Tag Archives: BPD forum

I recently emailed Dr. Lloyd Ross, a clinical psychologist from New Jersey with 40 years’ experience treating individuals labeled borderline. I asked him for his views on the DSM model of BPD, the causes of borderline states, what is the best treatment for BPD, and can it be cured. Here are highlights of his responses, with my emphases in bold:

Highlights of Lloyd Ross’ Viewpoints on BPD, excerpted from his essay below:

On therapists who don’t want to work with people labeled BPD:

Lloyd Ross: “To avoid their own discomfort, poorly trained therapists describe borderline individuals as untreatable. Well trained therapists do not have that opinion. Well trained therapists have done well with these individuals, provided the therapist knows both what to expect and what he is doing.”

On good outcomes for people labeled “BPD”:

Lloyd Ross: “With proper insight oriented therapy, people labeled as borderline do go out in the world and function quite well in relationships, employment, etc. Like the rest of us, the goal is not to be cured from some non-existent disease, but to simply resolve the issues in our development that stop us from functioning in a relatively comfortable manner.”

On BPD as a medical diagnosis:

Lloyd Ross: “(As a medical diagnosis) the only “borderline states” that have any validity for me are on the border of Mexico or Canada… In addition, there is absolutely no real science behind any of the DSM/ICD diagnoses.”

On how the word borderline can be useful:

Lloyd Ross: “To use the term “borderline” from a developmental point of view is very different… Using the term “borderline developmental issues” enables us to go back in time and try to help the individual to undo, modify, and soften development that did not go smoothly the first time around.

On the developmental approach to working with people labeled BPD,

Lloyd Ross: “Using this model, the therapist works toward a stronger continuum of emotional development so that a person can function in a more whole way. Borderline states are not a disease or medical issue and therefore, nobody is “cured.” People just learn to handle various issues in their lives in a smoother, more comfortable manner for them.”

On suicide prevention:

Lloyd Ross: “According to Bertram Karon, Ph.D., one of the world’s most prolific researchers on effective psychotherapy with patients labeled schizophrenic, suicidal, and borderline, ‘The best suicide prevention is effective psychotherapy.‘ ”

On the value of medication in treating people labeled BPD:

Lloyd Ross: “The medication approach (anti-depressants and/or anti-psychotics) is useless in people with borderline, suicidal, and PTSD symptoms. In fact, anti-depressants are probably one of the major causes of iatrogenic (doctor induced) suicide in this country in the past 15 years, especially with individuals labeled borderline.”

On trauma as the cause of borderline states:

Lloyd Ross: “The cause of “Borderline Personality Disorder” as with all of the “made-up” psychiatric diseases, is trauma at various times and stages in a person’s development… The failure of all-good and all-bad perceptions to fuse is the genesis of all pathologically borderline states.”

My Interaction with Dr. Ross

So (this is Edward writing again) these were my favorite parts of what Dr. Ross said about BPD; for the full context, see his essay below. I had originally found Dr. Ross because he is a member of ISPS, the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis, with which I’m also involved. In my first email, I asked Dr. Ross for detailed answers to my questions about what causes BPD, what best treats it, is it curable, and how best to understand Borderline Personality Disorder. I wanted to see how much his viewpoints agreed with mine, and to share an informative and hopeful professional viewpoint on BPD with readers of this blog.

In response, Dr. Ross decided to write a single essay incorporating his responses to all the questions. That essay, “The Borderline States” forms the main part of this post. I highly recommend reading it to see how a psychologist who’s worked with over 100 people labeled BPD understands the condition. To Dr. Ross, thank you for taking the time and for giving me permission to post your essay here.

For anyone wanting to know more about Dr. Ross, he is a leading member of the International Society for Ethical Psychiatry and Psychology (ISEPP), and is listed halfway down this page: http://psychintegrity.org/isepp-leadership/

Lloyd Ross, Ph.D.

Dr. Ross also features in a Youtube interview about helping people labeled schizophrenic here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyL0jjI93OI . I want to note that Dr. Ross did not edit this video (the silly cartoonish elements, which in my opinion detract from its message, were added by the filmmaker Daniel Mackler). But you can see from the way Dr. Ross talks that he is an experienced, committed therapist.

Lastly, I want to note that Dr. Ross’ viewpoints appearing on my site does not mean that he endorses or agrees with everything else on this site. His viewpoints are his own. Here is his full essay:

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THE BORDERLINE STATES

By Lloyd Ross, Ph.D.

During my 40 years as a clinical psychologist, I have worked with approximately 100 to 150 people who would be considered to fall into the developmental framework of what psychiatry, in its simplistic and arbitrary way, views as borderline. These people were seen by me for at least one year or longer, some multiple times per week, and others once per week. Some were also seen at multiple times in their lives with months or years separating periods of therapy.

Before discussing this topic, I would like to make clear the issue of psychiatric diagnoses of “mental disorders.” I am a clinical psychologist who was psychoanalytically trained from an ego-developmental point of view. I have been in full time practice for almost 40 years and have always avoided psychiatric diagnoses, as I see the various recreations of the DSMs/ICDs as nothing more than an attempt to medicalize things that are not medical to begin with (human behavior, experience, and development). On that basis, the only “borderline states” that have any validity for me are on the border of Mexico or Canada.

In addition, there is absolutely no real science behind any of the DSM/ICD diagnoses. All of them were developed in committee rooms inhabited by mostly elderly white psychiatrists, many of whom represented the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry. When I do write down a DSM or ICD diagnosis for a patient, and only at a patient’s request, it is usually because they need it to submit their claim to an insurance company (Unfortunately, that is the way things are in this society). The diagnosis I use is almost always “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” for several reasons:

It is the closest thing to a real diagnosis in the entire list of diagnoses, in that anyone who is having enough emotional difficulties to seek help has had personal trauma of some sort as one of the factors that caused their difficulties.

From a developmental point of view, the stage of development we are in or approaching when trauma occurs is a good predictor of how, when, and where it will manifest itself in a person’s life.

The term itself, “Post traumatic stress disorder,” is sufficiently vague and innocuous to the public to make the term less of a problem for an individual than terms such as schizophrenia, psychopathic or sociopathic personality or borderline personality disorder, none of which have any real scientific meaning.

I approach human (not medical) diagnosis as a strictly developmental issue. This is because of the influence of Margaret Mahler on my training, with some influence from Donald Winnicott, Edith Jacobson, Anna Freud, Renee Spitz, Heinz Kohut, and Ruben and Gertrude Blanck. I come primarily from Mahler’s framework and was supervised by her. Therefore, any real diagnosis that I do comes from an ego-developmental point of view.

The Causes of Borderline States

When looking at a detailed history of people commonly diagnosed by others as “borderline personality,” I and others have found that these people have experienced emotional trauma at around the time in development when children make and solidify their attachment to the mother figure. To be a bit more specific, it is associated with trauma during that time frame and there is always deprivation around that time frame also. I am sorry for making it such a complicated thing, but when you don’t simply slap a diagnostic label on somebody, but are instead dealing with a real live very unique individual and their complex developmental problems, the issues are no longer simple. In addition, to perceive a human being as literally being a diagnostic category—a “Schizophrenic” or a “Borderline” –dehumanizes that person.

The cause of “Borderline Personality Disorder” as with all of the “made-up” psychiatric diseases, is trauma at various times and stages in a person’s development. That is why taking a carefully detailed history of that person’s development, events in his life, and memories in his life is so important. All extreme mental states, whether with someone diagnosed as schizophrenic, borderline, neurotic, etc. which are meaningless terms, are the result of things gone awry or not having been negotiated at various stages in development, resulting in trauma.

Even if a child seems to progress just fine, if and when trauma occurs, it lingers or appears dormant. When, even years later, that trauma is reactivated by another trauma, that person seems to exhibit or feel the original trauma again without ever connecting the two. That is why I use the diagnosis “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” with insurance companies, for everyone, and not just those who come for help. There is no human being that I have met who has never experienced trauma, although the ramifications for some are more disturbing than for others.

A Personal Example of Trauma

I will give you a vivid example of trauma in myself. From the time I was five years old, until I was ten years old, I was ordered by my parents to come home from school immediately, without lingering with my friends, to babysit my grandmother because I left school at exactly 3:00 P.M. and the lady who took care of my elderly grandmother left at exactly 3:00 P.M. My grandmother was a very nice roly-poly lady who only spoke Polish and Yiddish, was blind except for being able to see shadows, and was able to walk from her chair to the bathroom to the bed by feeling along the wall. I, on the other hand, did not speak Polish or Yiddish.

My grandmother was alone for the five minutes it took me to get home and I would run all the way because I was told that if anything happened to her, it would be my fault, a rather heavy burden for a five year old. I would sit with her in a second floor apartment with very little communication and stop her from trying to cook. I would lead her to the bathroom and to the bed so that she didn’t fall, and sometimes would make her tea, watching that she didn’t spill it on herself. Either my aunt or my parents would come home between 5:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M., but quite often, they went shopping first or had something else they had to do, and I would be stuck with my elderly grandmother for two to five hours. Also, since she couldn’t see, she kept all the lights off to save money so the apartment was usually dark.

When I turned ten years old, I was offered a part-time job and because work was so important to everyone in the family, when I got the job, my babysitting for my grandmother was over. What I remember most about the babysitting was that everything was always dark and boring. One day, I was very bored, and I could hear my friends playing ball in the street below. I opened the window and sat on the ledge, playing catch with a friend who was in the street. Someone called the police because they thought I was a jumper and they yelled and screamed at me.

After getting three advanced degrees, and spending a year in a horrific war, I came home and met my wife to be. I was always relaxed, mellow and calm, yet at the same time I could be cutting and sarcastic, all of which I admired in myself. After getting married, several days per week I would work late and come home when it was dark. When the lights were on in my house, there was never a problem, but if I came home to a dark house, I would feel enraged and walk in complaining, arguing, and finding fault with everything.

Since I was in my own training analysis at the time, I brought it up, thinking it had something to do with my time in Vietnam. I finally made the connection between the rage that I felt when forced to stay in a dark house watching my grandmother, and the rage I felt when I approached my house with the lights off. Having made that connection, I no longer became enraged when the lights were off, but I didn’t feel wonderful either. My wife and I discussed it and she kept the lights on for me, just like motel 6. Another point is that learning the connections don’t necessarily take away all the feelings but they do put you in much better control of those feelings.

That is a relatively minor cause of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Who is a victim of it? Everyone, unless their childhood was just perfect, wonderful and magnificent, and so far, I haven’t met anyone who falls into that category, although I never met Donald Trump.

Understanding Borderline States Developmentally

I would like to discuss development at this point because most of the people seen by psychotherapists fall into this particular phase, including those with the arbitrary junk-science diagnosis of borderline personality. In normal development, when a child approaches the end of the first year or year-and-a-half of life, he/she begins to recognize that he is not one with his mother, but is really a separate person. This infantile recognition marks the beginning of the end of the “symbiotic” phase of human development and the very beginnings of the “practicing” sub-phase, sometimes better known as “the Terrible Twos.”

The practicing sub-phase is an early part of what we often refer to as the “separation-individuation” phase of development, which is so critical to our development that Margaret Mahler describes it as “the psychological birth of the human being.” In fact, she wrote a classic book just about that phase of human development. During the practicing sub-phase, the child’s mission in life is to prove that he is a separate, autonomous human being, while at the same time not losing his mother. He does this by exploring his world, by trying to do things independently from his mother, and by oppositional behavior, (saying “NO”.)

Sometimes, this phase of development can seem like a battle against parental figures, hence the name “terrible twos.” Problems that develop in the early parts of this phase of development which a child is unable to successfully negotiate often result in what they call “borderline issues” because they develop during the beginnings of the quest for reality on the part of the child, which occurs right on the border of these two stages. Let me go on with a description of the next part of the child’s emotional development.

The Identification Process, Splitting and Fusion in Childhood Development

While beginning the Separation-Individuation phase of development, the child begins to identify himself with others. This is also the beginnings of object-relationships. Since the primary object for all of us is mother (whoever mothers us, which could be the actual mother or a mother-substitute) a child will view his mother in very black and white terms as he begins the identification process. Mother in her nurturing role is seen as “good mother.” However, when mother says no to the child, restrains him in some way or frustrates him, mother is then seen as “bad mother.”

From a child’s point of view, “good mother” and “bad mother” are really two different people. This view occurs because of the absolute black and whiteness of the child’s thinking process at this age and is a normal age appropriate distortion of reality. The process is called “splitting.” When mother gives me what I want, she is “good mother” but when she doesn’t give me what I want, she is “bad mother.” These are totally two different people to the child.

Over the next year or two, depending upon intervening variables as well as the child’s developmental progress, the image of the “good mother” and “bad mother” slowly start to come together in a merging process. At a certain point, these objects “fuse” and we no longer see our mothers as a split object, one mother good and the other mother bad. When these objects fuse into one object, one mother, we begin to entertain a different, more sophisticated perception of mother. Now, mother is seen as basically “good mother” who sometimes is not so good. However, both the good and the bad are housed in the same person.

This is a much more benevolent view of mother and allows for imperfection. Since mother is the “primary object,” the first person that a child identifies with, his perception of mother is vital to his perception of himself. Once the good and bad objects are fused, the extreme view of the child is softened. He now also looks at himself and is able to perceive that: “I’m basically a good child, but sometimes I do bad things. Even so, I’m basically a good child.” This benevolent perception does two things. First, it brings us in closer contact with reality, and secondly, it softens out perfectionism both toward ourselves and toward others.

When Fusion Doesn’t Take Place, or What Causes BPD

The failure of all-good and all-bad perceptions to fuse is the genesis of all pathologically borderline states.Please be aware also that I am using the word pathology to simply indicate development gone awry or developmental stages that were not properly negotiated by the child for multiple reasons.

Sometimes, due to external issues that limit or skew a child’s development, or because of internal developmental issues, a child is unable to fuse the good and bad objects into one unified whole. In that case, the split object remains and the child continues to perceive dual mothers; one totally good and one totally bad. Under such conditions, when the child identifies with the primary object (the mother or mother substitute) and then looks in the mirror, he sees either a totally good person or a totally bad person with no redeemable good qualities, a rather harsh view of oneself. Under the above conditions, the child’s development makes him a potential candidate for suicidal thoughts, feelings, and actions as well as borderline personality issues.

In the so-called “borderline personality, the core issues precede the problematic object relations and there are also introjective insufficiency problems with good and bad objects. Most people dealing with this issue feel an “annihilation panic” based upon the relative absence of positive introjects that pretty much explain the “borderline” person’s feeling that he is existentially at risk.

In other words, in the so-called “borderline personality, it isn’t just the all-good, all-bad splitting that is a problem, but the paucity or insufficiency of positive introjects. Therefore, in people who are labeled borderline, the negative introjects predominate. Also, in come cases, they are able to solve the introject problem by, in a sense, becoming their own object or mother, thereby being able to comfort themselves without the need for anyone else. In the psychiatric establishment, these individuals are referred to as “psychopathic” or “sociopathic” personalities. They don’t need mothering because they can self-comfort.

Let’s go back for a moment to clarify what the mother-introject is. In normal development, the child internalizes a mental representation of the mother figure and the way in which she makes the child feel. Negative introjects always come from abuse that has taken place at around this time. (Sorry if I am blaming the mother figure but that is the way it goes.)

Gerald Adler, also a student of the ego-developmental model, extends this work further. He describes ideal treatment as an attempt to establish and maintain a dialectic therapeutic relationship in which the therapist can be used over time by the patient to develop insight into adequately holding onto positive introjects. In this manner, the arrested developmental process is set in motion to correct the original developmental failure. This is called the “Deficit Model” in that the focus is on what is missing in that person’s development. Therefore, the core of borderline issues precede the destructive internal object relations. The issues involve abuse, the absence of a positive introject, and an overwhelming constant feeling of being at risk, primarily due to the insufficiency of positive introjects.

Treatment for the Borderline, Suicidal or PTSD individual:

In this section, I would like to consider a number of treatments for these people and then the treatment of choice.

Electroconvulsive Shock; (ECT):

ECT, in short, involves placing two electrodes on the skull over the frontal area of the brain and then administering voltage that is comparable to being hit by lightening. This does several things. First, it causes a brain seizure which is not very pretty to observe. To avoid looking like a scene out of the movie “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” psychiatrists first administer sedative drugs to mute the external manifestations of the electric shock such as thrashing, broken bones, etc.

However, when they do this, to cosmetically improve the look of the treatment, they also have to increase the voltage, thereby creating greater cell damage and cell death in the brain, flatness of personality and affect, and slower thinking processes. This damage is similar to what occurs as a result of long-term heavy alcohol use, only more rapidly and in more focused areas, particularly the frontal lobes of the cortex or the cognitive and feeling areas of the brain. Keep in mind that ECT is similar to a motorcyclist head injury or explosion in that it is a “traumatic head injury,” only it is being caused by a physician. One of the side effects of killing off brain tissue in the frontal lobes is apathy, flatness of personality and affect, and slower thinking processes.

As a result of all this brain damage, suicidal thoughts (all other thoughts as well) are deferred and drastically slowed up. Therefore, ECT may temporarily defer suicide or soften the borderline issues, but it does not prevent it and when a person slowly and partially recovers from the shock, he may realize the lesser functioning he is left with permanently, an even greater motivation for suicide. ECT also significantly and drastically disrupts any psychotherapeutic process that is being carried on. Earnest Hemingway was “cured” of suicidal tendencies by ECT.

Bio-psychiatric Treatments:

The medication approach (anti-depressants and/or anti-psychotics) is useless in people with borderline, suicidal, and PTSD symptoms. In fact, anti-depressants are probably one of the major causes of iatrogenic (doctor induced) suicide in this country in the past 15 years, especially with individuals labeled borderline. Also, feeding a patient cocktails of neuroleptic (anti-psychotic) drugs acts simply as a temporary chemical restraint, often called a “chemical lobotomy.” In that sense, these drugs mimic ECT. I do not consider either real help for any individual and they make insight oriented therapy almost impossible.

Insight Oriented Psychotherapy:

According to Bertram Karon, Ph.D., one of the world’s most prolific researchers on effective psychotherapy with patients labeled schizophrenic, suicidal, and borderline, “The best suicide prevention is effective psychotherapy.” He goes on to say: “Of course the most effective way to prevent a suicide or a homicide is to understand the psychodynamics and deal appropriately in therapy with these issues.”

There are also a number of things that need to be confronted in any psychotherapeutic situation with a suicidal, borderline, or homicidal patient. Among them are his anger and rage, his and the therapist’s loss of control, and in a child, the significant parental issues, the patient’s developmental history, the ways in which the patient transfers his feelings (mostly bad and angry feelings) to the therapist, as well as other issues.

From the therapist’s perspective, he must be able to handle the transferential rage and aggression as well as his own feelings of lost control and counter-transferential issues. Finally, the therapist needs to deal with his own fears of the patient’s potential for suicide. Untrained,

fearful therapists, when they hear that a person has suicidal issues, get frightened and immediately refer to a psychiatrist, as though a psychiatrist has some magical powers to treat this problem. Unfortunately, when a therapist does this, the message to the suicidal person is “I am afraid of you and am not equipped to deal with your issues. The therapist is then immediately written off by the suicidal person.

Many therapists also do not want to work with people diagnosed as borderline for two reasons. The first is the rage that gets directed at the therapist. Borderline development results in a huge need to get rid of the aloneness they feel which results in rage that makes the therapist cease to exist. The counter-transference from an untrained therapist is a feeling of “I’m wasting my time here.” The second is that the amount of support needed is greater than with other kinds of development. You cannot resolve splitting until a strong positive relationship exists between the person and the therapist. In treatment, the unrealistic idealization of the therapist that the borderline person feels must be slowly worked through and discussed before it is relinquished and replaced by a more realistic view. The therapist’s goal is to slowly build up the earlier foundations of the ego structure through the relationship so that what is established is a not-so-harsh superego and thereby, less black and white pain in the face of imperfections and losses.

It should be understood that using this model, the therapist works toward a stronger continuum of emotional development so that a person can function in a more whole way. It is not a disease or medical issue and therefore, nobody is “cured.” People just learn to handle various issues in their lives in a smoother, more comfortable manner for them.

A Brief Word on Narcissism

Narcissism is often a component of borderline development. Narcissists are particularly hard to treat. They find it difficult to form the warm bond with a therapist that naturally evolves with most other patients. Instead, they often become cold or even enraged when a therapist fails to play along with their inflated sense of themselves. A narcissistic patient is likely at some point to attack or devalue the therapist, and it is hard to have to sit with such people in your office unless you are ready to accept that.

But narcissism is not limited to the most extreme cases who make their way to the therapists’ office. A healthy adjustment and successful life is based to some degree on narcissism. Healthy narcissists feel good about themselves without needing constant reassurance about their worth. They may be a bit exhibitionistic, but do not need to play down the accomplishments of others to put themselves in a good light. And although they may like adulation, they do not crave it.

Normal narcissism is vital for satisfaction and survival. It is the capacity to identify what you need and want. Pathological narcissists, on the other hand, need continual reassurance about their value. Without it they feel worthless. Though they have a grandiose sense of themselves, they crave adulation because they are so unsure of themselves that they do not know they have done well or are worthwhile without hearing it from someone else, over and over. The deeply narcissistic person feels incomplete, and uses other people to feel whole. Normally, people feel complete on their own.

”Narcissistic vulnerabilities,” as psychoanalysts refer to them, make people particularly sensitive to how other people regard them. You see it in marriage, in friendships, at work. If

your boss fails to smile when you greet him it may create a withdrawn, anxious feeling. If so, your self-esteem has been hurt. A sturdy self absorbs that so it’s not unbalanced. But if you’re vulnerable, then these seemingly small slights are like a large trauma. On the surface, extreme narcissists are often brash and self-assured, surrounded by an aura of success. Indeed, they are often successful in their careers and relationships. But beneath that success, feelings of inadequacy create the constant need to keep inflating their sense of themselves.

If they do not get the praise they need, narcissistic people can lapse into depression and rage. Thus, many workaholics put in their long hours out of the narcissist’s need to be applauded. And, of course, the same need makes many narcissists gravitate to careers such as acting, modeling, or politics, where the applause is explicit. Many difficulties in intimate relations are due to narcissism. Marriage brings to the fore all one’s childhood yearnings for unconditional acceptance. A successful marriage includes the freedom to regress, to enjoy a childlike dependency. But in marriage, a couple also tend to re-enact early relationships with parents who failed to give them enough love. This is particularly hard on those with the emotional vulnerabilities of the narcissist. All narcissists fall within the borderline spectrum of development, but not everyone in the borderline range of development is narcissistic.

In summary, a therapist who is not trained well will usually not want to work with a borderline person for all the reasons mentioned above. To avoid their own discomfort, they describe them as untreatable. Well trained therapists do not have that opinion. It is not a “mental illness,” (disease.) Rather, it is a breakdown of a developmental phase that we all go through and involves issues such as splitting, negative introjects, probably early abuse, suicidal issues, and narcissistic issues.

Well trained therapists have done well with these individuals, provided the therapist knows both what to expect and what he is doing. Because it is not a disease, no one is cured. However, with proper insight oriented therapy, people labeled as borderline do go out in the world and function quite well in relationships, employment, etc. Like the rest of us, the goal is not to be cured from some non-existent disease, but to simply resolve the issues in our development that stop us from functioning in a relatively comfortable manner.

Finally, the term “borderline,” when used as a medical or psychiatric diagnosis, is both useless and harmful in that it is suggestive of some evasive disease. To use the term from a developmental point of view is very different and can be helpful in understanding what in a person’s development, was not negotiated properly or fully successfully. Using the term “borderline developmental issues” enables us to go back in time and try to help the individual to undo, modify, and soften development that did not go smoothly the first time around. This is something that is being done all the time by private-practice therapists, but not by what I call “the mental health industry.” However, that is a topic for some other time.

Below, I have listed a few books that should be helpful in understanding the treatment issues with individuals who are dealing with borderline issues. I have also included several books that support my opposition to the medical model approach.

Jacobson, E. (1954). “The self and the object world: Vicissitudes of their infantile cathexes and their influence on ideational and affective development.” The Paychoanalytic Study of the Child, 9, 75-127.

Jacobson, E. (1964). The Self and the Object World. New York: International Universities Press.

If you are looking for explanations of why borderline mental states develop, what keeps people stuck in them, and how to become free from BPD, please check out the pages above. In my opinion these object-relational approaches explain BPD’s etiology and how to become non-borderline better than CBT or DBT approaches. The latter approaches typically focus on short-term symptom management rather than transformation and cure of BPD.

Today’s post will add another approach, the Kleinian Approach to Borderline States. Kleinian theory focuses on the Paranoid-Schizoid Position and the Depressive Position.

What do these words mean, and why are they useful in understanding borderline conditions?

Melanie Klein: An Early Psychoanalytic Pioneer

To start with, why is this approach called Kleinian?

The Kleinian Approach to BPD is based on theories developed by Melanie Klein, an early 20th century psychoanalytic theorist. Klein grew up in Austria and received psychotherapy as a young woman from Sandor Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst who was himself an innovator in understanding schizophrenic and borderline individuals.

Klein studied psychoanalysis in Berlin and London, eventually becoming a renowned therapist of emotionally troubled children. Working with children enabled her to see processes of all-good and all-bad splitting occurring live in the therapy sessions. Having often been severely neglected or abused, the children misperceived Klein as all-good or bad based on their past experience with “bad” parents and their need for a “good” parent-substitute.

Melanie Klein noticed that the more abuse and neglect the child had experienced, and the worse the relationship between child and parents, the more severe the splits in the child’s perception of the therapist tended to become. This meant that, despite the fact Klein tried to treat them well, children with worse parents tended to more unrealistically perceive Klein as an “all bad” mother figure. This transference (transfer of feelings from past people onto present people) is related to how borderline adults tend to misperceive potential friends or lovers as uninterested and rejecting.

Klein also noticed that as they improved in therapy, children who had initially utilized all-bad splitting became attached to her as a good parent figure, growing emotionally to the point where they could trust her and feel concern for her wellbeing (reparation). Children from healthier families often started therapy at this more advanced position, allowing Klein to observe a more positive mode of relating from the beginning.

From these two different ways in which the children related, Klein posited two primary orientations toward perceiving the world as seen from the child’s perspective. She called the first, developmentally earlier, more dangerous and isolated way of experiencing the world the Paranoid-Schizoid Position. She called the second, later, more secure and dependent orientation the Depressive Position.

These two positions can be understood as regions along a continuum of increasingly healthy and integrated personality development, the early, paranoid-schizoid part of which anyone can get stuck in given enough trauma and deprivation, and the later, depressive part of which anyone can reach given sufficient positive resources.

The Paranoid-Schizoid Position

The paranoid-schizoid position is the way of experiencing one’s emotional life that corresponds with what are commonly labeled “borderline” mental states or “schizophrenic” mental states. In my understanding, borderline and schizophrenic states of mind are not different in kind, but only in degree; schizophrenia represents a more severe version of the splitting, self-fragmentation, and primitive defenses seen in borderline states. As discussed in the many psychodynamic books linked to in earlier posts, both borderline and schizophrenic states are fully reversible and curable with sufficient help over a long period.

Back to the topic at hand. Why is the “paranoid-schizoid” position called that and what does it mean? The “paranoid” part refers to misperceiving external others who are neutral or mainly good as “all-bad”, as paranoid people tend to do, and the “schizoid” part refers to the tendency to withdraw and isolate oneself from meaningful emotional interaction with others, as people who feel threatened and unsafe tend to do. When a person’s entire personality is centered around misperceptions of others as “bad”, and when a person isolates themselves interpersonally in a way that tends to perpetuate these misperceptions by not allowing in good corrective influences, they are operating in a “paranoid-schizoid” mode.

The term paranoid-schizoid is not meant to be pejorative, only descriptive. I think a better, more empathic term for the paranoid-schizoid position in adulthood would be something like, “The Adult Worldview of the Traumatized Child”, so please keep that in mind when reading these labels.

To Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position represented the earliest way of experiencing the world for a young child who is trying to test whether or not the external environment is safe and supportive. If parents and other important relationships mainly nurture and protect the child, then the child’s mind will develop a feeling of basic trust in others and of basic security in the world. This security will help them gradually move from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. If neglect, abuse, trauma, and excessive stress predominate during childhood and early adulthood, if bad experiences tend to outweigh good experiences, then the person will get stuck in or regress back to the paranoid-schizoid position. In experiential terms, such a person will continue to feel unsafe and to distrust others relatively indefinitely, and may not even know what they are missing.

Core Features of the Paranoid-Schizoid Position

The paranoid-schizoid position features:

Lack of basic trust in others’ good intentions (“the basic fault” as discussed by Michael Balint).

Predominance of all-bad splitting, i.e. viewing others as rejecting and oneself as unworthy.

Predominance of feelings of aggression and envy over love and gratitude.

High levels of anxiety, a constant feeling of insecurity at the core of one’s being (“ontological insecurity” as discussed by R.D. Laing).

Tendency to isolate oneself and withdraw emotionally and physically. Related lack of awareness of others as psychologically separate from oneself.

Lack of subjective sense of self.

Use of primitive defenses to block awareness of what a precarious emotional state one is really in, including denial, avoidance, splitting, projection, and projective identification.

My Emotional Experience of the Paranoid-Schizoid Position

These descriptions are highly technical and removed from real experience. So here is how I experienced the paranoid- position, i.e. the out-of-contact and ambivalent symbiotic phases, emotionally:

As my being a tragic, pointless character from Dante’s Inferno, The Myth of Sisyphus, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis, doomed to endlessly repeat the same self-defeating behaviors.

As being alive and dead at the same time – alive physically, but dead emotionally and dead because no one knew the real me.

As being unable to trust or confide in anyone, because nobody cared and nobody had time.

As waging a constant battle to keep my terror and rage controlled enough to survive.

As having no idea how normal people handled relationships and problems so easily, resulting in intense envy.

As continuing to live emotionally in “the house in horrors” (my name for my childhood home with its physical abuse).

As being a cork on a stormy ocean on which you could never tell where the next rogue wave was coming from.

As being very aware of negative inner thoughts and very unaware of what was going on around me. These bad thoughts felt to me like persecutory demons.

As having to preserve as much energy as possible to defend against potential threats and dangers. I often thought of myself as an emotional warrior, spy, antihero, or survivor.

As being willing to do almost anything addictive or distracting rather than feel the bad feelings and the lack of love.

As a vengeful, hateful, evil person who wanted to take revenge on those who hurt me and strike back at the world to feel some power and self-control (It is, I think, this type of paranoid-schizoid experience in young men that leads to many mass shootings).

These experiences are correlates of periods when the all-bad self and object images were mostly or fully dominant over the all-good self and object images. For many years this paranoid-schizoid nightmare was my predominant way of experiencing myself and the world.

Kleinian Theory Compared to Other BPD Models

The paranoid-schizoid position correlates with the following elements of other psychodynamic approaches to borderline states:

The Four Phases, the Structural Deficit, the Borderline-Narcissistic Continuum, and the Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions are all analogous ways of describing a continuum of early emotional development. They can be diagrammed as follows:

These “primitive” (meaning developmentally early) mental states are consequences of the quantitative predominance of bad self/object images along with a structural deficit or quantitative lack of positive, loving memories. In other words, they result when someone has many more bad than good experiences with other people, and/or when the absolute quantity of good experiences is severely lacking.

The lack of love in the past, combined with present fears that keep a person from getting help, can keep an adult frozen in the paranoid-schizoid position for long periods. In this situation, partly out of a fear of being totally alone or objectless, the person will maintain a closed psychic system of all-bad internal relationships which feel like tormenting inner demons, monsters, and ghosts. The paranoid-schizoid state can feel like an inner hell or prison.

How All-Bad Splitting Perpetuates the Past in the Present

The psychoanalytic writer James Grotstein discussed the persecutory inner representations of the paranoid-schizoid individual as acting like a “band of merciless thieves” or “gang of brutal thugs”. These internalized relationships attack the vulnerable part of the person that wants help by “warning” or convincing them that other people are untrustworthy, uninterested, dangerous, and rejecting, even though this may no longer be true in the present.

These all-bad identifications are seen when borderline people tell themselves, “I am worthless”, “Nobody wants to help me”, “Other people are always too busy”, “Things never work out for me,” and so on. There is sometimes a large grain of truth to the negative perceptions about others, but the individual also colors what they perceive and how they “self-talk” to make things seem worse than they are. In other words, they only perceive the all-bad aspects and spit out the all-good aspects of external reality. In this way they treat themselves as did people in the past who rejected or neglected them. This is what I call “perpetuating the past in the present.”

These paranoid-schizoid inner objects or memories can be understood as schemas, i.e. models of representing past experience in relational terms. These models actively (and often negatively) influence the ability to perceive reality accurately and to take action in the present.

Examples of Paranoid-Schizoid Experiences in the movies Psycho, Memento, and Beauty and the Beast

Several dramatic films illustrate how past attachments to “bad people” (and more importantly the internal memories and self-images based on them) block potential relationships to new good people and serve to keep a person in the paranoid-schizoid position.

1 – Psycho: Norman Bates, the main character in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie Psycho, exemplifies the paranoid-schizoid position. Because he fears his mother will be jealous,Norman is unable to tolerate the presence of Marion, the lovely young woman who comes to visit his motel. In reality Norman’s mother is long dead, her rotting body sitting in a rocking chair in the manor house. But her remembered voice is alive and well in Norman’s mind, guiding his actions and ordering him to kill off the threatening “good” Marion. Norman constantly experiences the paranoid-schizoid position, always feeling in danger and unable to trust outsiders.

While Norman is actively psychotic, a parallel process plays out in less disturbed borderline mental states. Norman’s acting out of the way he imagines his mother would reject his wish for a positive relationships is disturbingly similar to how some older borderline adults keep sabotaging potentially good relationships even after their abusive parents are gone.

Memories of disappointing interactions with parents and peers therefore “warn”, discourage, and forbid the borderline person not to trust and enjoy relationships with friends and lovers in the present, because if they do they would be betraying their past bonds to “bad” parents (for which they often blame themselves) along with risking rejection by the potentially good new person. These unconscious identifications with all-bad memories of others explain the repeated frustrations that many people labeled BPD have with keeping friends and sustaining romantic relationships.

2 – Memento: In the Christopher Nolan movie Memento, Guy Pearce plays a man, Leonard, suffering from an unusual problem: He cannot form any new memories. This disability occurs after he is beaten by thugs who killed his wife. Therefore, Leonard is unable to remember or trust anyone new he meets. He becomes at the mercy of others who take advantage of his limited memory. The constant sense of paranoia that Leonard exhibits, along with his great difficulty in discerning what is real and what is a deception, brings to mind the paranoid-schizoid mental experience.

People in severe borderline states experience similar difficulty in trusting others, usually not because they are amnesiac, but because they are terrified that being dependent and close will result in rejection or abandonment. In other words, they believe that the present will repeat the past, i.e. that new potentially good people will turn bad, just as parents and peers rejected them before. These inner identifications with bad objects (objects meaning memories of past experiences with others), combined with a lack of past good object experience to rely on, results in the extreme sensitivity to imagined rejections that borderline people experience.

I remember watching the Alien movies starring Sigourney Weaver as a boy and being terrified by the scenes where a human suddenly turned into a monstrous alien and devoured a fellow colonist. I think these scenes unconsciously reminded me of my father’s sudden transformations into a violent “monster” who physically beat me, which fed my expectation that other adults would turn on me if I trusted them.

3 – Beauty and the Beast – This classic Disney children’s movie features another example of the paranoid-schizoid position. Due to his selfish and unkind nature, the Beast has been condemned to live alone in his castle. He can only be redeemed if he learns to love, and earn another’s love in return, by the time the last petal falls from a magic rose. Rather than seeking someone to love him, the Beast becomes hopeless, withdrawing and isolating himself inside his castle. When beautiful Belle tries to penetrate his “closed psychic system” of all-bad expectations, the Beast is at first aggressive and untrusting, not believing that anyone could love his true self.

Gradually, the Beast is able to permit himself to be vulnerable and experience closeness with Belle. This move toward dependence, attachment, reparation of past harms done to Belle, and realization of the love he has been missing out on, represent the Beast’s movement from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. Gaston and his henchman represent the all-bad objects that serve to impede reunion with the hoped-for good object, and the Beast must courageously fight them off to defend his loving relationship with Belle (i.e. to securely reach the depressive position).

The Reunion Adventure – The Transition from Paranoid-Schizoid to Depressive Positions

The timeless theme of reuniting with a lost good person by fighting past inner demons and their external representatives repeats in many classic stories, including Homer’s Odyssey, the Star Wars movies, the epic films Gladiator and Braveheart, Disney’s Aladdin and the Lion King, The Crow starring Brandon Lee, and the novel Ulysses by James Joyce.

To see the repeating narrative, the reader need only think of how the heroes in these stories are separated from those they love by evil forces (“bad objects”) before having to fight for reunion with the lost beloved person. Joseph Campbell provides many additional examples in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This epic battle comes alive in long-term psychotherapy of borderline states, when the battle is to overcome all-bad projections onto the therapist in order to trust and depend on the therapist as a new good person who can help the client move from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position.

I don’t believe in the validity of these labels as distinct illnesses; rather, people should be viewed as individuals with strengths and deficits along a continuum of ego functioning. If they are used at all, labels like “borderline” should be viewed as a cross-sectional working hypothesis which loosely describes the problems a person has at a given time. Labels like borderline emphatically do not represent a life-long incurable illness. In my view, DSM labels should be abolished since psychiatrists are unable to use them as descriptions of pathological ways of relating with which people can work creatively and from which healing is possible.

Instead of something descriptive and hopeful, the labels become perversely distorted into “lifelong mental illnesses” which may have a genetic or biological cause. This is ridiculous since no evidence exists that these diagnostic labels are reliably discrete from each other, nor that biology or genes cause the behavioral, thinking, and feeling problems to which they refer. It’s offensive, harmful, and arrogant for psychiatrists to misrepresent problems of thinking, feeling, and behaving to vulnerable people in this reductionistic, pessimistic way.

Therefore I again encourage readers to consider dismissing labels like Borderline Personality Disorder from your mind. Instead, consider thinking of individuals as experiencing different degrees of borderline mental states at different points in time and of borderline states as being reversible and curable.

The Depressive Position and Healthy Personality Organization

Since much of psychology is focused on what is wrong, pathological, symptomatic, or immature, I now want to focus on maturity, wellbeing, and psychological health, using these questions:

How do many people become emotionally healthy, i.e. able to regulate their feelings and self-esteem, to work productively, to form families, become loving parents, have intimate friendships, etc.?

Are emotionally healthy people just born that way, or does childhood experience matter, and if so how much?

Why are healthy people not borderline?

How can borderline people become healthy?

These are complicated, contentious issues. In most cases the answer to the first three questions is that emotionally healthy people have had many more good than bad interpersonal experiences during childhood and early adulthood. Compared to people who are labeled “borderline”, healthy people usually had more opportunities for trusting, secure, long-term relationships with family, mentors, and/or friends.

These good relationships helped them to overcome the paranoid-schizoid position and the splitting defense – which when not prolonged are normal parts of every child’s development – and to develop the capacities for ambivalence, self-soothing, and intimacy. In one sense, emotionally healthy people were simply lucky – lucky as helpless children to be born into families where love and security were readily available.

I believe that that healthy adults usually had parents who, while they were not perfect, were good enough most of the time. They were “good parents” in the sense of empathically responding to the child’s needs, comforting the child when vulnerable, and supporting the child’s independent activities. These parents themselves usually had a considerable degree of healthy personality development; i.e. the parents themselves did not make heavy use of splitting, and were able to accurately perceive their children as mostly good and only slightly “bad”.

In other words, non-borderline parents tend to raise non-borderline children, and borderline parents are more likely to raise future borderline children. NAMI won’t like to hear that parents can cause BPD, but sometimes the truth hurts! As suggested by the ACE Study below, poor parents do more frequently raise “borderline” and “schizophrenic” children. That doesn’t mean poor parents are “bad people” or that they should be blamed for their children’s problems. Of course they shouldn’t.

Rather, the passing of abuse and neglect from generation to generation is a tragedy for which no one should be blamed, and the maximum amount of support should be given to such parents to help understand and change destructive patterns.

What evidence is there that childhood neglect and abuse correlate with increased mental illness diagnoses? The recent Adverse Childhood Events (ACE) Study of 17,000 people has explored the connection between childhood trauma and psychological disorder diagnoses. This study polled a large sample of people seen in hospital and medical settings to examine how frequently different childhood experiences co-occurred with physical illnesses and mental health diagnoses. The ACE study shows that childhood emotional, physical, and sexual abuse are directly linked to likelihood of both physical illnesses and psychiatric disorder diagnoses in a dose-response fashion.

In other words, the more abuse and neglect a person reports in childhood (a higher “dose amount”), the more likely a person is to be labeled depressed or schizophrenic in adulthood. In my way of thinking, more childhood abuse and neglect increases the chances that a child will become developmentally frozen in the paranoid-schizoid position and experience borderline or psychotic mental states as an adult.

Drawing from the ACE Study, one can deduce that the less frequent and severe are a person’s experience of childhood abuse or neglect, then the less likely the person is to experience “borderline” or “psychotic” mental states as an adult. Although the survey didn’t cover it, I’d bet that a strong group-level relationship exists between having had reliable, loving parents (as the child experienced and perceived them) and an absence of adulthood mental health diagnoses. It makes sense because families with less abuse and neglect also tend to have more love, safety, closeness, and support (I could be wrong about this, but I doubt it. Let me know what you think in the comments).

Further Sources on Healthy Childhood Emotional Development

I’ve now digressed again from the topic of healthy personality development. The point I’m trying to make is the obvious one that loving, secure human relationships are crucial to healthy personality development. Rather than discuss this in further detail, I wish to refer the reader to sources with more knowledge than I.

Some good writers on healthy emotional development, i.e. on what helps young people become navigate past the paranoid-schizoid position (avoiding borderline mental states) and enter the depressive position (and reach psychological maturity) are:

1) Donald Winnicott (e.g. Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment). Drawing on his experience as a English pediatrician-therapist, Winnicott wrote beautifully about the healthy emotional development of children. Winnicott viewed psychotic states, including severe borderline conditions, as the “negative” or mirror image of healthy emotional development. They illustrated for him what happens when healthy parenting and secure childhood emotional development break down or never become firmly established.

2) James Masterson (e.g. The Seach for the Real Self). The American psychiatrist Masterson wrote mainly about borderline and narcissistic personality problems but always discussed what happens in healthy development contrasted with borderline/narcsisistic development. Masterson explained how the borderline/narcissistic personality could become healthy via internalizing self-parenting functions that they had missed out on in childhood.

3. Heinz Kohut (e.g. How Does Analysis Cure?). German psychoanalytic pioneer Kohut developed the field of self-psychology, which emphasizes how crucial empathic parental responses are to the young child’s healthy emotional development. He developed the ideas of idealizing relationships (referring to how children need a strong, safe figure to protect them) and mirroring relationships (how children need a supporter for their independent functioning).

It is instructive to understand how these relationships fail to occur between parents and future-borderline children, and why such relationships do not immediately develop when borderline adults go to psychotherapy. From Kohut’s work one can see that if most borderline adults had received adequate mirroring and idealizing responses earlier in life, they would likely be normal, healthy people today.

4. Lawrence Hedges (e.g. Working the Organizing Experience; Interpreting the Countertransference). Hedges is a California-based psychogist who recasts schizophrenic and borderline disorders as “organizing” and “symbiotic” ways of relating. He has a beautiful way of writing about how certain “potentials” for relateness never get activated and become frozen in borderline and psychotic mental states.

In the link below, which is a free e-book download, the sections “Borderline Personality Organization” (pg. 98) and “A Brief History of Psychiatric Diagnoses” (pg. 175) may be of interest. Hedges’ writing is not about healthy personality development per se, but he constantly discusses what positive elements are missing in the relational development of psychotic and borderline individuals.

5. Allan Schore (e.g. Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy). Schore is an American neuroscientist who writes about how reliable, secure attachments to caregivers are crucial to the developing child’s brain, and how attachments to parents directly modify how genes express or do not express themselves. Schore does fascinating brain scans showing how the child’s brain reacts to good and bad relational influences. He also shows why nature and nurture cannot be separated and quantified in such myths as, “BPD is 50% genetic.”

6. Ed Diener (e.g. Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth). Diener is a sociologist who researches how social conditions on a national level promote psychological wellbeing. Good parents and mentors are extremely important for psychological wellbeing, but factors beyond family relationships a lot too, like poverty, educational opportunities, diet and exercise, safety at a national level, freedom of speech, economic inequality, etc. Diener shows how these factors correlate with psychological wellbeing for national populations.

As you might guess, people in Iraq, North Korea, and Zimbabwe really are far less happy than people in Sweden, Australia, and South Korea. While advanced nations have their own problems, Diener shows how some poor countries suffer such severe instability that they are almost “paranoid-schizoid” worlds, in which people constantly feel threatened and are unable to actualize their potential for wellbeing.

Compared to the simplistic, symptom-focused descriptions of Borderline Personality Disorder in the DSM , I believe so much more can be understood from these etiological depth approaches to borderline conditions and healthy emotional development.

Returning to the Kleinian theory, how does the Depressive Position fit into healthy emotional development?

Key Characteristics of the Depressive Position

The Depressive Position, although it might sound negative (like “depression”) actually refers to increasing psychological attachment, closeness, and maturation. It was called “Depressive” because Melanie Klein focused on how the young child experienced guilt, depression, loss, and increased concern for their parents’ wellbeing as they emerged from the paranoid-schizoid position. These “depressive” feelings emerged as the child became more aware of the mother as a separate person and realized how their actions could negatively affect her.

But the real thrust of the depressive position lies in these characteristics:

Increasing security in positive emotional attachments to other people (development of basic trust).

Predominance of all-good splitting followed by capacity for ambivalence.

Increasing awareness of others as psychologically separate from oneself.

This link from the Melanie Klein Trust explains the depressive position in more detail.

My Experience of the Depressive Position and Therapeutic Symbiosis

As stated before, a lot of these descriptions are technical and removed from real experience. So here is how I experienced the early part of depressive position, i.e. therapeutic symbiosis, emotionally:

As the end of a war in which I was a survivor emerging from the ruins, realizing that the whole battle had been going on in my mind, not the outside world.

As an incredible realization that I was not in danger, people could be trusted, the world was safe.

As emerging into real life after years in emotional hibernation.

As seeing the world and other people in color for the first time.

As “the halcyon (blessed) days”, my term for this period in my diaries.

As the sense that everything was right between me and my therapist, that I was like a blessed child and she was like a loving mother.

As a regression to being the playful, carefree child that I had never been able to be in my actual childhood.

As an overpowering sense of loss about how many years had been lost to misery and fear because of my parents’ abuse.

As feeling like a savior because I had saved myself by finding good people, just like the Beast found Belle to free himself from the curse.

As a feeling that I had become a self, a real spontaneous person for the first time.

As being able to enjoy other people and experiences, finally.

These feelings are correlates of the period when all-good self and object images begin to outweigh all-bad self and object images, i.e. the phase of therapeutic symbiosis as described by Harold Searles. In this stage the formerly borderline person achieves a healthy narcissistic level of object relations and reaches the depressive position.

Why Don’t Some People Reach the Depressive Position?

In severe borderline mental states, a person remains fixated psychologically in the paranoid-schizoid position as described above. Viewed from various vantage points, the borderline person tries to become healthy, functional, securely attached, and able to regulate their feelings but may fail because:

They have a quantitative deficit of internal positive memories that healthy people use to soothe themselves (Adler’s structural deficit), but don’t yet have the resources in their daily life (friends, family, therapist, etc) needed to repair this deficit.

They are simply unaware of the positive relationships they are missing (Searles’ out-of-contact state).

They are scared of trusting and depending on others due to past trauma which they fear new people may repeat, and thus choose to remain attached to their internal all-bad relatoinships (Fairbairn’s object-relations model of the attachment to the bad object, Searles’ phase of ambivalent symbiosis).

Their use of primitive defenses like denial, avoidance, acting out, projection, projective identification, leads them to unconsciously repeat self-destructive patterns.

This is only a brief attempt to answer the question about why some borderline individuals remain in the paranoid-schizoid position. I am still optimistic that healing and progress out of the paranoid-schizoid position is possible with appropriate insight and help.

Final Thoughts On Recovery From Borderline States and Progress to the Depressive Position

My own experience and research suggests that the single most crucial thing for recovering from borderline states in a long-term, dependent, loving relationship with somebody. It could be a therapist, a friend, a family member, or some combination of these. Feeling safe and loved by others for years is what enables children to become healthy adults, and it is also what enables once-borderline adults to become healthy adults. There is no substitute for internalizing the self-soothing and self-organizing functions of a loving, mature outside person. As I described in an earlier article, I experienced these healthy relationships for the first time with my therapist and a few key friends.

In normal childhood development, there is a “healthy” or normative paranoid-schizoid experience called the practicing phase, in which the child jubilantly explores the world and is relatively unaware of mother’s separateness. For most children, the parents and environment are supportive enough that the children don’t get stuck in a pathological paranoid-schizoid position that later becomes a borderline adult mental state.

Rather, most healthy children progress out of the normative paranoid-schizoid position into the depressive position at a relatively young age. These children are unlikely to regress and become borderline unless they encounter some overwhelming prolonged stress in later life. For children who are constantly neglected and abused, the risk is much greater that they will psychologically retreat and stay in the pathological paranoid-schizoid position, which leads to experiencing a chronic borderline or psychotic mental state in adulthood.

Again, it should be remembered that “normal”, healthy people would often have become borderline adults if they had experienced sufficiently severe abuse and neglect in earlier life. In Kleinian terminology, anyone can get stuck in the paranoid-schizoid mode of functioning when subjected to enough prolonged stress. People opearting in borderline mental states are not fundamentally different than the rest of us – they are just as human, but more unlucky in some ways.

With sufficient insight and resources, borderline people can become weller than well, i.e. become free from borderline symptoms, study and work productively, have intimate friendships and relationships, and experience joy and meaning. After they have become psychologically mature, life challenges still present themselves, but former borderlines can handle them with confidence as the capacities for ambivalence, regulating feelings, and maintaining self-esteem are developed in the depressive position.

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I welcome any correspondance at bpdtransformation@gmail.com

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or are trying to help a borderline individual, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment.

Do we want people to believe that BPD is a real psychiatric illness that they must manage for the rest of their lives, or do we want to promote a message of hope which says, “You can become free of your emotional distress and live the life that you want”?

By presenting BPD as a severe mental illness which can be managed but not cured, the medical model of the BPD label utterly fails to promote hope. Additionally, the medicalized concept of BPD is scientifically broken: It does not describe a valid illness which is consistent across a population.

Why do we keep using BPD if there is so much wrong with it? Is it possible that we would be better off without BPD?

And if BPD is should be abolished, what should replace it?

This article addresses how to replace BPD.

To this question, my first answer is “Nothing” – that we should simply abolish BPD – and my second answer is “Emotional Dysregulation Susceptibility Syndrome”, which I will explore as a hopeful alternative. Let’s discuss these options.

My central conceptual argument is that Borderline Personality Disorder as defined in the DSM is an unreliable, invalid concept. Given its current popularity, it’s not easy to fight against the prevailing notion of BPD as a valid mental illness. But after speaking to many people who also experience BPD as a flawed, discouraging concept, I am more resolute in this view than ever. If you are unfamiliar with the argument against BPD, please see here, especially Myth #5:

While I prefer to understand people without labels, due to practical considerations I contend that BPD should be replaced by a more hopeful label. This new label should refute the myth of BPD as a life-long mental illness and emphasize vulnerability to stress along a continuum.

My position against BPD directly opposes the thinking of many in the psychiatric establishment, including large organizations like TARA BPD, the Treatment and Research Advancements Association for BPD, and NEA BPD, the National Education Alliance for BPD.

TARA and NEA assert that BPD is a “serious psychiatric illness”, one which they can reliably investigate and for which they will create improved treatments. In my opinion, these medicalized viewpoints represent poor research and outright misinformation.

Let me list and critique some of National Education Alliance BPD’s main positions. I hope the reader will sense how badly NEA’s claims on BPD, which often border on outright lies, fail to meet the criteria for good science and basic common sense.

1) BPD is an “illness”.NEA’s position: BPD is a single illness which causes unstable mood and behavior.Edward’s response: BPD is not one unitary entity that causes anything. BPD is not a single illness because the symptom-cluster that supposedly represents BPD cannot be reliably identified by any biomarkers (genes, brain scans, etc.) nor reliably identified by different psychiatrists across a population, as the NIMH recently admitted.
The way a person understands their world based on past experience leads to unstable mood and behavior.

2) Genes are involved in causing BPD.NEA’s Position: Scientists generally agree that genetic and environmental influences are likely to be involved in causing BPD.Edward’s response: This is misleading on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start. Again, BPD is not one reliable entity. And there is no evidence that genes “cause” any of the distress-experiences denoted by the BPD misnomer – such thinking involves the mistaken assumptions that genetic and environmental factors work as separable influences in a quantifiable manner. I have written about these distortions extensively in my article on twin studies (#4).

3) Brain scans provide evidence that biological factors cause BPD.NEA’s position: There is evidence that biology is a factor in causing BPD, due to imaging studies in people with BPD showing abnormalities in brain structure and function.Edward’s response: Does NEA think the public cannot understand basic cause and effect? Of course seriously distressed people have observably different brains than “normals”. That doesn’t mean biology or genes cause these differences; neglect, abuse, and lack of love, which are much more prevalent in those labeled “borderline”, inevitably lead to different brain functioning. But that doesn’t even mean those things cause BPD or that BPD is real. Never take a difference for an illness.

4) Biological factors make people more likely to develop BPD.NEA’s position: The current theory is that some people are more likely to develop BPD due to their biology or genetics and harmful childhood experiences can further increase the risk.Edward’s response: The current theory is a demonstrably false hypothesis. Constitutional vulnerability to stress may make it easier for some people to become overwhelmed by environmental stress, but that doesn’t mean that BPD is in any way a valid illness, nor that such people cannot become well. Plus biology and genetics do not act alone in the way implied in this reductionist model (see – http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/06/are-dsm-psychiatric-disorders-heritable/ )

5) The prevalance of BPD can be quantified.NEA’s position: BPD affects 5.9% of adults at some time in their lifeEdward’s response: Does anyone really believe that a subjective, descriptive label with no biomarkers can have its prevalence reliably identified to a tenth of a percentile?

6) BPD is a life-long mental illness.NEA’s position: People with BPD have BPD for life. (NEA stops short of saying this outright, but they imply it. Their website talks over and over about managing and reducing symptoms in “borderlines” of different ages, never once mentioning the possibility of becoming free of “the illness” or discussing the possibility of full recovery)Edward’s response: This is one of the most damaging myths being promoted about BPD. Problems that are mislabeled BPD can be fully recovered from; people who once approximated borderline criteria can eventually live a satisfying, emotionally normal life. Many thousands of people have already done so. Getting better is hard work, but people do not have to cope with and manage BPD for life. People need real hope, not the discouraging prospect of a life-long illness.

My Manifesto Against National Education Alliance for BPD

As can be seen, NEA BPD set themselves up as the experts on how to define and treat the BPD “illness”, an illness label they obviously intend to keep. But they may not have considered that former “borderlines” can see through their propaganda.

My position on NEA’s “BPD as a serious psychiatric illness” notion is this:

Severely distressed people do not have accept the label BPD as an identity nor as an explanation for their problems.

Emotional problems are not reducible to “psychiatric illnesses”, nor are they the exclusive province of psychiatry.

Effective help which often leads to full recovery from problems mislabeled BPD already exists. Recovering does not require the assistance of “experts on BPD”, nor does it require DBT and medications, although these can help. Also, people can have their own definition of recovery and a meaningful life.

Emotional problems mislabeled BPD can be completely healed and do not have to be managed for life.

It’s time to say goodbye to National Education Alliance’s harmful theories about BPD as a life-long psychiatric illness, to end the borrowed time these theories have been living on.

Why Reducing BPD’s Stigma is Doomed to Failure

I also oppose the message of blogs that attempt to put a positive spin on BPD, like “Make BPD Stigma Free”. In my opinion, reducing BPD’s stigma and building “BPD Pride” is doomed to failure. To me, these efforts resemble shifting deck chairs around on the Titanic. Similar attempts to reduce depression’s and schizophrenia’s stigma have foundered miserably; the problem is that reducing complex emotional issues to medical labels explains nothing and fails to empower people.

Two examples of such programs are instructive:

“Defeat Depression”, a large scale British campaign to reduce the stigma of Major Depressive Disorder, failed to reduce stigma and did not improve outcomes according multiple follow-up studies.

“Beyond Blue”, an Australian attempt to reduce the stigma of so-called mental illnesses, also backfired. Studies investigating its effect found that those who knew less about mental illness diagnoses, or who were given a diagnosis but rejected it, had better outcomes than similar people who believed they “had a mental illness.” This unsettling finding has been confirmed in John Read’s research (e.g. Models of Madness).

The disturbing conclusion of this research is that accepting that you have a “mental illness” – as opposed to rejecting the medical model of emotional distress – actually decreases the chances of recovery. This shocking Youtube presentation by critical psychiatrist Sami Timimi covers this and other eye-opening facts about “mental illness”:

If Defeat Depression and Beyond Blue failed to destigmatize depression, why should a destigmatization program for BPD succeed? Alongside “schizophrenia”, BPD is the most unreliable, invalid, confusing, harmful, stigmatized, and useless label. Even if BPD were to lose its stigma, it would remain an unreliable term that explains nothing about an individual’s problems.

Abolishing BPD – The Ultimate Goal

Borderline Personality Disorder can and should be entirely abolished. BPD should be consigned to history as a tragically misguided way of
concretizing emotional distress.

2) Label-Free Treatment: Psychotherapists and treatment programs would help distressed people without viewing them as borderline, no matter how much the client “fit” that outdated term.

3) Label-Free Family Understanding: Families would be helped to support their distressed members without being fed the fiction that their loved one “has BPD.” Parents, siblings, partners, and children would find that their loved ones’s problems can be understood without calling them borderline.

4) A New Research Paradigm: into severe emotional problems would cease to be focused around BPD. It would instead use the emotional dysregulation spectrum concept that I’m going to discuss. There would be more qualitative, experience-focused research, and less quantitative label-focused research.

5) Abolition of BPD and the DSM: BPD would be abolished from the DSM, as it has already been removed from ICD (Europe’s version of the DSM, from which BPD was recently voted to be dropped). Furthermore, as an unscientific fraud full of fictional illnesses, the entire DSM would be eviscerated.

In time, BPD would be viewed as an outdated relic, a sad symbol of an age where psychiatrists constructed bizarrely misguided labels for emotional distress. People in the year 2200 would look back on “BPD” in disbelief, much as people today look back at centuries-old conceptions of physical illnesses. BPD would be mocked alongside notions of evil spirits released by bloodletting and plagues caused by divine curses.

A BPD-free world is possible. People often underestimate what can be done over long periods of time with sustained, gradual effort. Perhaps BPD’s life is already growing short.

How Would We Understand People Without BPD?

What a scary idea! How could we ever understand people showing “borderline” symptoms without labeling them with BPD?!

How do we understand the problems of anyone we care about?

1) Listen to their story. Learn about what past and present experiences are causing their distress. Develop a shared understanding of their problems based on their history.
2) Learn about what they want to change in the future. Develop a shared understanding of their needs and dreame.
3) Understand fundamental human needs for security, dependence, respect, and independence.

These are the fundamental steps in the Formulation approach to emotional distress, as described here in the story of Emma:

People labeled “borderline” can be effectively helped without labeling them as BPD. But because of the reductionist ideology that has crippled the minds of too many mental health “professionals”, abolishing BPD without a replacement label may be a bridge too far. The Big Pharma profit incentives which maintain the need for medicalization of emotional distress present another obstacle.

The First Step Toward Abolishing BPD – A New Name

Supported by the public’s ignorance about what a precariously perched house of cards “BPD” really is, the profit motives of psychiatrists and Big Pharma will likely block a total abolition of BPD, even though BPD paradoxically never existed and does not exist today. Therefore, I suggest the intermediate step of renaming BPD, something which has already begun to happen for other pseudo-illnesses such as “schizophrenia”.

If done well, renaming BPD would accomplish multiple goals:

1) Undermine the false conceptualization of emotional distress as an illness that is consistent from person to person.
2) Emphasize that emotional distress varies along a continuum and that people labeled “X” are not always “X” (i.e. are not always distressed, but are vulnerable to stress).
3) Reduce stigma by introducing a fresh name without negative connotations.

Despite these hopeful goals, one might argue that replacing BPD with another name would lead to just as much stigma and misunderstanding.

But could a new name truly aspire to be as miserably uninformative as Borderline Personality Disorder?

Would BPD by any other name smell just as bad?

I doubt it.

Japan, Jim Van Os and the Abolition of Schizophrenia

I’ve gone through some brainstorms about what BPD could be renamed, drawing on the campaign against “schizophrenia” for ideas. Many people are calling for schizophrenia to be abolished, and Japan legally abolished schizophrenia about 10 years ago

(Yes, there really are no more “schizophrenics” in Japan. They have a new, less-stigmatizing name for psychotic distress, meaning “integration syndrome” in Japanese, and people undergoing psychotic episodes are no longer called schizophrenic. The entire Japanese government-recording and psychiatric-labeling system for psychosis has been changed. See here – http://www.schres-journal.com/article/S0920-9964(09)00140-6/abstract ).

Van Os renames schizophrenia, “Psychosis Susceptibility Syndrome” , or PSS. The name implies that psychotic experience occurs along a spectrum of severity, involves vulnerability to environmental stress, and that people who have been psychotic in the past are not always psychotic today. In this model, “schizophrenia” as a discrete illness is meaningless and false.

If BPD were renamed Emotional Dysregulation Susceptibility Syndrome, what would that mean? The EDSS concept would contrast with BPD as follows:

1) Spectrum, Not Illness: EDSS represents a spectrum or continuum of increasing vulnerability to emotional distress. Despite similar appearances, people vary along this spectrum both in degree and kind of distress experienced. People would have more or less “EDSS” in relation to others and themselves at different times. EDSS is therefore not one illness, but a spectrum of related conditions – it refutes the misrepresentation of BPD as an internally reliable illness.

2) Vulnerability, Not Illness: EDSS represents a heightened susceptibility or proneness to emotional distress, usually correlated with neglect and abuse in childhood. EDSS itself does not cause distressing symptoms; rather, it represents the heightened likelihood of environmental stress causing these distress experiences. Compared to BPD, EDSS gives more weight to what happens around a person, rather than to isolated non-contextual internal experiences. EDSS is a syndrome – again meaning it represents similar-appearing experiences which do not necessarily reflect a consistent underlying illness.

3) Recovery and Freedom, Not Management: EDSS represents a psychological state that someone can be in at a certain time of their life, but can grow out of and be free from at a later time. It is in no way a lifelong condition. With effective help, people have a good chance of moving out of the EDSS spectrum for good. This refutes one of the most damaging lies about BPD: That BPD is a life-long illness.

(If you could rename BPD, what would you call it and why? Or would you keep BPD? Let me know in the comments.)

A Psychodynamic Model of the EDSS Continuum

Drawing on my psychodynamic background, I conceptualize Emotional Dysregulation Susceptibility Syndrome as a continuum marked by a relative deficit of positive self/object images, combined with a predominance of all-bad images of self/other within a person’s mind. The deficit of good internalized experience and the predominance of all-bad self/other images would usually correlate with neglect, lack of love, abuse, or trauma caused by parents and peers in childhood and young adulthood. I developed this model fully here, drawing on the “master theorist” of borderline-spectrum conditions, Ronald Fairbairn:

The deficit of all-good images leads to the inability to comfort oneself when under stress (i.e. emotional dysregulation), and to the increased susceptibility to stress relative to most emotionally-healthy people who had more consistent past and present support. All the other distress experiences commonly labeled “borderline” – e.g. destructive acting out, lack of identity, rapidly shifting moods, extreme rage, splitting, etc. – would be understandable results of having to cope with the missing self-comforting functions that can only be provided by a predominance of good self/other images over bad self/other images, i.e. enough good experiences in one’s past to reassure oneself when under present-day stress.

These distress experiences would also be understood as present-day replayings of past trauma; i.e. as the projection of the all-bad self-object images internalized in childhood onto others in the present, which make the person experiencing EDSS feel that they are “bad” and others are rejecting or unavailable.

EDSS might also be conceptualized as the spectrum encompassing the “Out of Contact” through “Ambivalent Symbiotic” Phases in this 4-phase model:

These descriptions do not represent an illness, but rather a dynamic state of relating to oneself and others at a certain time. One can function at any point along the spectrum from almost Non-EDSS to very severe EDSS – i.e. from approaching a normal range of being able to comfort oneself and function well, with only occasional regressions into serious distress – down all the way to very severe EDSS, in which the distress experiences are constant and severe to the point that normal functioning is not possible. Hopefully that the paradigmatic differences between BPD and EDSS are clear.

You Don’t Have to Accept the BPD Label

I hope these ideas will be encouraging and provoke thought about whether BPD really is valid and useful. Replacing BPD might seem unthinkable now, but there were times when women voting seemed impossible, when black people being free seemed impossible, and when tobacco causing health problems seemed impossible. Radical change can happen. Often, the process leading to a dramatic change is gradual and unseen, like when decades-long pressure building under the Earth’s crust goes unnoticed before an earthquake.

If a small but growing number of people reject the BPD label, this process can build momentum toward renaming and/or abolishing BPD. I encourage everyone reading this who has ever been labeled “borderline” to consider that you no longer have to identify with or accept BPD, period.

If a psychiatrist labels or has labeled you as BPD, or if the voice of people calling you borderline is stuck in your mind, I encourage you to tell them something like this:

“The BPD label you’ve called me is a simplistic checklist of distress factors, factors which anyone under stress for long enough can experience to different degrees. There are no reliable genes, brain-scans, or other biomarkers which can identify so-called BPD. In fact, BPD is in no way a reliable classification; it is an “illness” fabricated out of thin air without a basis in real science.
There is therefore no proof that I have an illness like you say, or that there is anything innately wrong with my brain; most likely, I am reacting in a perfectly logical way to the stresses I’ve gone through. There are other, better ways to understand my problems, and I do not accept the false label of BPD that you are putting onto me. If I get enough help, I can fully recover and live the life that I want.”

Psychiatrists and therapists need to hear this from more of the people they call “borderline”!

Where did BPD come from, and how was it passed down to modern humans? This is one of the more vexing questions of our age. For an answer, we must turn to the all-knowing wisdom of American psychiatry, which proclaims:

“BPD is strongly inherited.” This seems like an answer to where BPD comes from. But is it? According to psychiatry, BPD is mostly in the genes. But how could this dreaded disease have originally developed? It didn’t magically appear out of thin air. This begs the question: From whom was BPD first inherited? Who – or what – was the real “first borderline”?

In this essay, I will take psychiatry’s thinking to its logical conclusion. If BPD is “inherited”, we should be able to track down the ultimate source of this nefarious malady. Prepare to embark on a fascinating journey of discovery. My theories are based on exciting new research by paleo-psychiatrists – scientists who study mental illness in prehistoric creatures.

Early Speculations on BPD’s Origin

Early paleo-psychiatrists raised questions like the following in their search for the first borderline:

Was the first borderline an Egyptian slave who began to have mood swings under the stress of building the pyramids, 4,000 years ago?

Was the first borderline a Bronze Age Mesopotamian mother who, traumatized by hard farm work, began to view her fellow Sumerians as saints or devils, 8,000 years back?

Or was the first borderline an Aboriginal hunter-gatherer who, after too many attacks by dingo dogs, developed identity diffusion in the Australian outback 12,000 years ago?

Did one of these ancient people first become borderline, and then transmit the invisible plague to their prehistoric children and on to us?

(Aside: Recent genetic studies by paleo-geneti-psychiatrists have suggested that, in addition to the normal gene-coding letters A, C, G, T, the nucleobases B, P, and D are present in the genomes of people with BPD. So genes in a healthy person, which originally read GATCGGCAGGAACAT, would come to read GATBPDCAGBPDGAABPD. This is why I’ve been terrified to get my genes mapped, for fear those cursed combinations will appear in my DNA strands, to be inevitably passed on to my children.)

BPD and Early Man

Returning to the main story, the answer is no. BPD extends back far past early Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Aborigines. Paleo-psychiatrists recently found that cavemen exhibited Borderline Personality Disorder. Witness the following image, found on prehistoric cave walls at Laschaux, France, but concealed from the public until now:

With this life-like painting revealed, it is scientifically proven that BPD extends at least to our caveman ancestors. This is so easy to figure out, even a caveman can do it.

So perhaps BPD originated with these forward-thinking cavemen, who would have been traumatized by living in rotten, damp caves. But couldn’t cavemen have inherited BPD from earlier humanoids?

Through the theory of evolution, we know that humans evolved from early apes (or at least, people who think the earth is more than 6,000 years old know this). So maybe the situation looks more like this:

These monkeys are not going to tell us anything definitive, but that bonobo looks suspicious.

Prehistoric Megafauna and BPD

Early apes are an interesting potential source of BPD. But other evidence suggests that the vile pathology worms its way back further. Each of these early humans and apes evolved from other life-forms, any of which could have been the first carrier of the abominable affliction. The plot thickens, and if we want to know where BPD truly came from, we must gaze deeper into the past.

Paleo-psychiatrists recently found this fossilized face-off between the last saber-toothed tiger and the first prehistoric mountain lion. From their facial expressions, it was deduced that they were snarling the following at each other:

But of course, if prehistoric big cats had borderline symptoms, it begs the question of where they inherited them from. Peering further over the horizon, here is cave art drawn by a Paraceratherium, revealing fantasies it was having about the cause of its family’s BPD symptoms:

So in this image, we have evidence that BPD existed at least 15 millions years ago, in the age of the megafauna or giant mammals. But there’s more.

Psychiatry’s Return to the Days of the Dinosaurs

Excited by their study of the megafauna, paleo-psychiatrists dug ever deeper into forgotten times. The two creatures below were recently unearthed from a prehistoric swamp after being buried by a 65-million-year old mudslide. Paleo-psychiatrists determined that they were saying the following:

Well, this picture is not exactly about BPD. But given the high comorbidity between Avoidant PD, Narcissistic PD, and Borderline PD, it can be said with confidence that BPD dates back at least 65 million years. If avoidant and narcissistic dinosaurs roamed early Earth, then giant reptilian borderlines would have been lumbering around too.

Indeed, all sorts of personality-disordered dinosaurs must have existed in the Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic eras. This makes it much more difficult to trace who the first borderline was. But it does enable us to watch The Land Before Time and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs with a new understanding of these monsters.

The search begins to seem endless. Who was the real first borderline? This situation brings to mind the Where’s Waldo? books, when you can never find the little guy in red and white stripes. Or perhaps it should be Where’s the Borderline?:

Sorry. Back to the topic at hand.

Early Avian and Mammalian Ancestors

As I was saying, paleo-psychiatry keeps making new discoveries. To trace the passage of the fearsome plague that is BPD into humans, we should also investigate the earliest birds and mammals, who shared common ancestors and lived alongside dinosaurs. Early mammals lived in a traumatic environment, which we know is a risk factor for BPD. Perhaps the trauma of living with big, scary dinosaurs was transmitted into their genes, creating a vulnerability that led to BPD in humans.

One can imagine the following scenario:

As well as this one:

It makes sense that borderline traits might develop and be genetically transmitted in such an environment. But couldn’t BPD have developed in pre-dinosaur times, and been transmitted from an even earlier starting point?

A Never-Ending Goose Chase

We must commend paleo-psychiatrists for their efforts to trace the early animal origins of BPD, efforts which are as scientific and respectable as those of modern-day psychiatrists to study BPD in humans.

But despite heroic efforts, paleo-psychiatrists have not traced BPD’s ultimate origin, which remains shrouded in mystery. It seems straightforward to follow the evolution of BPD from modern day humans, past cavemen, through early mammals and dinosaurs, all the way to the earliest forms of life. But this process never reaches a satisfying conclusion. With evolution working as it does, there would always be another creature from which to inherit BPD.

We can even imagine unicellular cells, flitting around the primordial fires of early Earth, transmitting their borderline traits to the first multicellular organisms:

But let’s not go there.

Creationism – A Solution to the Conundrum?

There is another possibility. What if evolution is wrong, and another theory explains BPD’s origin and heritability? What if Earth is only 6,000 years old, as creationists solemnly preach, and as some of our finest public schools teach as an alternative to evolution?

Creationism would elegantly explain how BPD developed. Under creationist teaching, BPD would be a result of the trauma that early humans experienced living alongside dinosaurs and other “prehistoric” creatures. If God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, he would have put all the creatures in history together, even if it resulted in strange alterations to traditional Biblical stories, like this:

And this:

And this:

No wonder the authors of the Bible wanted to cover up this sordid state of affairs. Living alongside dinosaurs would have made things scary and unpredictable for early humans. And as we know, such traumatic environments are a prime cause of BPD. Therefore, 6,000 year-old dinosaurs may have been the primary reason that BPD developed and was genetically passed down from early to modern humans.

Thus, the trauma of living alongside these monstrosities would have affected mankind’s genes such that BPD would quickly develop as a distinct disease. As Jonathan Swift might have said, this is “a modest proposal”, but a convincing one.

Just imagine the following scene, which would have been a daily occurrence 6,000 years ago:

And this:

Who would not develop borderline symptoms in such conditions?

And imagine having to live alongside abominations never preserved in the fossil record (the fossil record having been planted to trick creationists into believing in evolution, of course), like this:

How horrifying! Thank goodness the dinosaurs and swamp-monster abominations were finally wiped out in an almighty Ragnarok-like battle against invading aliens:

If dinosaurs and aliens had not annihilated each other a few thousand years ago, then modern civilization would never have developed. If dinosaurs did not die out, we poor humans would have been stuck with dinosaur-induced BPD symptoms, but without the gentle ministrations of modern psychiatry to help us manage them. So let us give thanks that aliens and dinosaurs wiped each other out, because DBT wouldn’t be possible with Tyrannosaurs constantly chasing us.

For me then, creationism provides the best explanation of BPD’s origin. It seems that we must renounce evolution, and accept the fact that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, since no other theory explains BPD’s origins so simply and elegantly. Remember Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

Alternate Explanations: Pastafarianism

However, there are other explanations. I was recently contacted by a Pastafarian paleo-psychiatrist, who suggested that the Flying Spaghetti Monster might be the cause of BPD. (For those of you who don’t know, Pastafarianism is the religion which teaches that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. Visit the Church of his Noodly Appendage at http://www.venganza.org )

So, instead of this scenario leading to BPD:

The following scenario would have accounted for the illness:

However, try as I might, I cannot think of a real reason why the Spaghetti Monster would want to create BPD. His job is to create the universe and feed people pasta, not generate mental illnesses. So this doesn’t fly with me, even if the Spaghetti Monster “flies” in another way.

The Scientific Integrity of My Research

For those of you who think this is a joke, it is not. Do not hurt my feelings by commenting that these theories are unscientific. I am earnestly supporting the efforts of our nation’s finest psychiatrists in tracing the source of BPD, a pathology which even they admit “the causes and origins of are unclear”. What could be more noble than shedding light on the origins of such a misunderstood affliction?

The Learning Doesn’t Stop Here

Despite their confusion around the inheritance issue, there is much more to be learned from psychiatry’s penetrating insights into BPD.

Psychiatry wisely teaches us that BPD is a “severe illness”, that BPD has a “course” and an “outcome”, that a certain percentage of the population “has it”, how psychotherapy and medications can “manage it”, and so on.

We must give thanks to psychiatry for creating such a wonderful and sympathetic way of understanding human emotional problems. Hearing the pontifications of psychiatrists on BPD is like listening to beautiful classical music.

If you want to learn more about these encouraging, scientifically-sound ideas via our government’s finest websites, as well as from many forums about BPD, make sure you are prepared. Before you research BPD’s cause and origins on Google, you will need:

A good sturdy chair.

A thick pillow to keep your ass from getting sore.

Eyedrops

Pain relief ointment for your mouse-clicking finger.

Tissues

Headache medications.

And take heart: Everything you learn about BPD from traditional psychiatry will be just as scientifically valid as my research above. Good luck!

The Scientific Process by which BPD Sprang Into Being

Now, if BPD first developed in early humans living alongside dinosaurs – who wouldn’t have referred to their symptoms as “Borderline Personality Disorder” – it is interesting to consider when the term BPD first emerged in modern psychiatric usage. Below is an imagining of the scientific process by which BPD may have developed.

A Conversation Between Two Medical Doctors of the Mind (i.e. Psychiatrists)

(Setting – Drs. Chillingworth and Hadley are smoking it up outside a beautiful hotel, discussing the current state of the psychiatric art..)

Dr. Chillingworth: “I’m so thrilled to be back at our nation’s premier psychiatry conference. Our catalogue of mental afflictions is crying out for new names. You know, my dear Hadley, I don’t think we’re upsetting people enough by calling them neurotics and hysterics. The masses need to know when there’s something wrong with them, and those labels just don’t do it for me anymore. We need something to really get the blood boiling.”

Dr. Hadley: “I agree, dear Chillingworth. I call the crazy ones schizophrenic, but they don’t even react! It’s most disturbing. I wonder where we’ve gone wrong.”

H: “How about “Weirdo Syndrome”? You know, for the bizarre folks who aren’t totally crazy, but we don’t know what else to call them?”

C: “Oh humbug! Is that the best idea you have?!”

H: “Forget that. What about “Queer Disorder”. It could be a brand new affliction. We know there’s something wrong with the homos; everyone suspects there’s a malignant germ plasm in their blood!

C: “No dice! Our friend Dr. Beavis beat you to the punch – he’s presenting this idea tomorrow. Don’t worry, homosexuality will be an official disorder. Come on, we need something original!”(Historical note: Homosexuality was an official DSM disorder until the mid 1970’s).

H: “How about….. “borderline”? We can use it on the ones who aren’t neurotics, but aren’t raving psychotics? You know, the people who are always pissing me off.”

C: “Yes!! Yes. That’s it. … “Borderline!” Wow…. It’s a bunch of bullshit – it doesn’t mean anything. But that’s why it’s brilliant. People won’t know what it means, so it will work perfectly. Let’s use it!”

H: “But how can we be sure that people will buy it, Chillingworth?”

C: “That’s easy. We list things about people who aren’t raving psychos, but are “messed up”. We say if you fit enough of the criteria, you’re a borderline! We make it all sound very scientific and official. The criteria could be things like being irritable, having mood swings, having relationship problems, being impulsive, etc. etc. Things anyone can have, taken to an extreme. Anything we can make up about people we don’t like.

H: “But do you really think people will believe that? I don’t know…”

C: “Of course they will! Give yourself some credit, Hadley; stop overestimating your fellow human beings. Most members of our species are uneducated idiots. If psychiatrists repeat a made-up label loudly and often enough, people will believe it. Remember, the public think we’re experts.”

H: “This is great! But you know, I just realized something, Chillingworth. You’re pretty messed up yourself.”

C: “Tell me something I don’t know!”

H: “Indeed. Moving on… do you think that, many decades years from now, people might think this “borderline” label we dreamed up is real, and a whole industry will be based around labeling and managing these “borderlines”? I don’t know if I would feel good about that.

C: “Oh stop whining! The Borderline affliction will become real, because we say it is. We became psychiatrists so we can be exalted as experts and given bundles of money. Who cares if we have no idea why people act like they do? And who gives a damn about people in the future? Our genius is that we have no idea what we’re talking about, but people pay us anyway. Have faith, my friend.”

And thus was born “Borderline Personality Disorder.”

(Historical note: BPD was in fact “born” after psychiatrists in the late 1930s invented the term out of thin air. Perhaps not exactly like this. But close enough…)

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or would like to more effectively help someone who is borderline, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment

A few months ago I discussed Gerald Adler, a clinician who treated BPD using a psychodynamic method. Today I’ll write about Jeffrey Seinfeld, the New York-based social worker who pioneered a Fairbairnian approach to Borderline Personality Disorder.

On this blog, it has been discussed several times how psychodynamic therapists have already “cured” BPD. Here is an example of a borderline patient’s recovery from Jeffrey Seinfeld’s book, The Bad Object.

I thought the reader might be interested to hear in detail about one of the “successes” in BDP recovery that are often referenced on this blog. Her story shows how complex, challenging, and interesting the journey may sometimes be. Some of this account is paraphrased, while the parts in quotations come straight from the text:

A Case Study: Kim (from The Bad Object, pages 101-123)

At the start of her therapy with Jeffrey Seinfeld, “Kim” was a 22-year-old Irish-American young woman. From ages 17-22, she been in regular treatment with another therapist, but had made little progress. After dropping out of high school at age 16, Kim lived at home with her mother. She did not work or attend school; rather, much of her time was spent abusing alcohol and illegal drugs.

With her first therapist, Kim showed no motivation to change, and indeed would boast about antisocial and destructive behavior, including tempting friends trying to quit drugs into again using them. She would regularly miss therapy appointments without calling to cancel. Her therapist as the time described her attitude as, “Who can blame me for messing up with all I’ve been through?”

Eventually, Kim’s first therapist referred her to Jeffrey Seinfeld. He had not lost hope for her, but felt that they had reached an impasse and that a change of approach might help her. Seinfeld scheduled Kim for twice-weekly appointments at a social-work center. For the first year or so of their work, she continued to regularly miss appointments without cancelling ahead, and to abuse drugs and alcohol regularly.

Kim’s Early Childhood

Seinfeld describes Kim’s childhood in this way: “Kim was an only child in an intact family. Kim’s mother alternately neglected and overindulged her. During Kim’s first year of life, her mother often ran out of the house to escape a psychotic husband… The mother would promise to return later in the evening, but often stayed away for days at a time. Kim therefore had repeated experiences of awakening to find herself abandoned by her mother. She grew to hate falling asleep if her mother was present, and she had frequent tantrums, insisting that her mother sleep with her…”

“Kim’s psychotic father had delusions that he was Jesus Christ and that demons possessed him. He underwent psychiatric hospitalization, and his condition was finally stabilized with psychotropic medication. Kim’s mother went to work when Kim was 3 years old, leaving her at home with her father, who was on disability. He would ignore her as he read the Bible or sat in a catatonic-like stupor. If she disturbed him with her romping and playing, sometimes designed to get his attention, he would beat her…”

“Throughout childhood, Kim was on a merry-go-round in her relationships with her family members. First she would side with her mother against her father. When her mother upset her, she would go to her father and side against her mother. When her father upset her, she’d go to her grandfather and side against everyone. As an adolescent, Kim took no interest in learning at school but instead “hung out” with peers and smoked marijuana daily. She dropped out of high school at the age of 16.”

Kim’s Early Therapy – The Out of Contact Phase

Seinfeld described how Kim’s life had little structure outside of her regular abuse of alcohol and drugs. She had trouble sleeping at night, and often slept during the day instead. Kim could not bear to be alone, and would often call her drug-abusing friends from high school to chat at all hours of the day. However, these friends were becoming less interested in her as they grew older and got jobs or moved away.

Kim felt that people were always too busy for her and would eventually abandon her. Thus, according to Seinfeld, her internalized bad object was a “busy object” who did not make time for her. Kim projected this image onto outside people based partly on experience with her real mother, who often did not take time to care for her.

Seinfeld notes that his main experience in relation to Kim early on was that she was oblivious to him psychologically. Seinfeld felt that Kim was unaware of his separate presence, but simply “told him stories” about her adventures with drugs, friends, alcohol, and other adventures. She did not expect any help, understanding, or admiration from her therapist. Referencing the out-of-contact phase, Seinfeld stated, “My position as an object was that of a witness as opposed to an admirer.”

After several months, Kim showed the first sign of becoming aware of Seinfeld’s intent to help when she wrote about him in her diary. She felt concern that her life was “going nowhere,” and wished that she could work or attend school. Shortly after this awareness, Kim cut her wrist with a razor. Seinfeld describes how “the self-mutilation is an antidependent attack against the vulnerable, libidinal self’s expressed need for an internal holding object. The antidependent self thereby reestablishes a closed, internal, invulnerable position.” In other words, the patient identified with how people rejected her need for help and support in the past, and repeated the same behavior toward herself in the present, acting as the bad parent and punishing herself (the bad child) inside her own mind.

This early phase of Kim’s treatment was an “Out of Contact” emotional phase, as described here:

Seinfeld acknowledged noted how Kim’s life was in reality extremely difficult. Her “friends” were self-absorbed and did not truly care about her, she had little support from her parents, and she had no structure in terms of a work or academic program, in addition to addictions to drugs and alcohol.

However, despite these severe difficulties, Kim did not respond by looking for positive ways out of her predicament. Rather, as Seinfeld describes,

“Kim was constantly preoccupied with how her friends and family exploited, rejected, and did not care about her. She would dwell on the rejecting object and rejected, unimportant self-image through the day and so would remain in a depressive, victimized position… Even when the external person did not in reality reject her, Kim would interpret the situation as rejection…. All of this is not to say that the external objects did not often treat Kim badly; on the contrary, they often did. But Kim had her own need to perpetually activate the all-bad self-and-object unit.”

Seinfeld noted that if one person in her life disappointed her, she would flee to a different person, but then find them equally disappointing. For example, Kim would go from her too-busy mother, to her drug-abusing and neglectful boyfriend, to her psychotic father, to friends who were moving on with their lives and did not care. Frustrated by each of these people, Kim comforted herself by using drugs, alcohol, and by stealing her mother’ car and “joyriding” despite not having a license.

Seinfeld said that none of his interpretations of her self-destructiveness worked at first. He stated,

“Throughout the first of fourteen months of her treatment, she seemed relatively out of contact with mer. She would recount her adventures and seemed to expect nothing from me but my continued presence… There was no spontaneous, gradual shift in her relatedness. She continued to miss sessions at the same rate as characterized her previous (five year) therapy… She used my empathy to justify her “who can blame me” attitude.”

The Safety of the Bad Object

Seinfeld began to intervene with Kim by gradually making her more aware of how her feelings of rejection and worthlessness were caused not only by the actual behavior of other people, but by how she responded to and interpreted their actions. Seinfeld states, “When she described a bad experience in reality, I empathized with how she felt but then shifted the focus to what she was doing to herself in her mind with that experience. It was not difficult so show that all of the external people she discussed reflected one image – that of rejection in relation to her own image as rejected.”

Seinfeld notes how Kim eventually became aware that she continually maintained a negative pattern of thinking and expectation about others, even when nothing happened in the outside world to justify such thinking. Seinfeld commented to her that such dwelling on negativity might occur because it felt safer to Kim to feel rejected than to feel accepted.

Seinfeld also beautifully described how, “I listened to all that she said and commented from the vantage point of the activation of internal object relations units. I listened to this patient as one would follow the stream of consciousness in a novel by Joyce or Proust, in which reality is always brightened or shaded by the narrator’s internal vision and experience. Kohut (1984) has suggested that such novels reflect the fragmented sense of self in severe psychopathology. One does not ignore external reality from such a vantage point; rather, close attention is given to the subtle but constant interplay between internal and external worlds.” In other words, when listening to a borderline patient speak, the skilled therapist constantly tries to perceive how reality is distorted or “colored” in a positive or negative direction by the patient’s splitting defenses.

Ambivalent Symbiosis

Seinfeld notes that the foregoing work gradually move Kim toward an ambivalent symbiosis. She gradually became aware that Seinfeld cared about her and wanted her to get better. For the first time, Kim asked her therapist in subtle ways about whether he was interested in her viewpoint. She was no longer only telling stories or complaining about abuse. She would ask Seinfeld if he felt that her mother and boyfriend cared about her. She wanted to know if Seinfeld understood the desperation and uncertainty she felt. Seinfeld described how Kim displaced many of her wishes for closeness and support from him onto the mother and boyfriend, because it was initially too threatening to get close to Seinfeld and trust him directly.

The relationship now assumed a stormy, emotional, push-and-pull quality. Kim would want support from Seinfeld but then be angry that she only saw him occasionally for therapy. She wanted him to understand her feelings about her family, but then criticized him as overly intellectual and detached. She became jealous that Seinfeld’s own family own family got most of his time and love, while she only got the leftover scraps. Outside of sessions, she began to cut down on her drinking, but then would return to it when she felt that two hours a week with Seinfeld was inadequate. She would perceive Seinfeld, “sometimes as a saint and at other times as a psychotic with delusions of grandeur, like her father.”

Seinfeld therefore described how Kim tried to take in his support and acceptance, but would then reject it, both due to her familiarity and loyalty to the rejecting object and to her fear of vulnerability and openness toward the good object. For example, Kim asked Seinfeld for help with getting a referral to a doctor who worked in the same hospital as Seinfeld for a minor medical problem. When Seinfeld responded helpfully, she rejected the referral as inadequate by viewing the doctor negatively. This related to her being threatened by feeling that someone truly cared about her.

At this point, Kim began attending therapy regularly and never missed sessions, even becoming upset if she was forced to be late. Rather than being upset with her mother or friends as often, she became intensely upset with Seinfeld if he did not meet her demands for caring and empathy in a perfect way. Despite Seinfeld making extra time to talk to her on the phone outside of regular appointments, she would become angry when he eventually had to leave to go see his family. She viewed him as a “too busy” bad object just like her mother and friends had been the “busy bad objects” before. She again felt angry with Seinfeld for expecting her to depend on him for support, but having only a few hours a week to spend with her. She continued to alternately view him as a caring, supportive person whose help she desperately wanted, and then suddenly to transform him into a too-busy, uncaring, impersonal therapist.

Seinfeld comments on this ambivalent symbiosis in the following way:

“The patient activates the all-bad self-object unit to defend against internalization of the positive self and object unit. The insatiable need serves the antidependent defense. By making her need for contact with the external object insatiable, the patient can perceive of herself as rejected regardless of the external object’s behavior. Therefore, the patient is always able to think of her needs as being unmet, to think of herself as rejected and of the object as rejecting. The activation of the all-bad self and object unit results in depression and rage. Insatiable need, the oral self-exciting object relationships (e.g. use of alcohol while rejecting a truly supportive other), is then activated to counter the depression and rage. In this regard, the all-bad self-object relations unit becomes a vicious cycle constituting both the rejecting and exciting objects… Insatiable need serves to maintain the perception of the object as rejecting in antidependent defense. This patient succinctly stated the antidependent position, “If I don’t think you like me, why should I bother to like you?”

In other words, it’s necessary to understand how the patient is an active agent in perpetuating their view of the therapist and others as rejecting (creating an impossible-to-fulfill, or insatiable need) rather than potentially helpful and positive.

The Transition to Therapeutic Symbiosis

Seinfeld now constantly remarked upon the ways in which Kim focused on the ways in which he (Seinfeld) was not available because this felt safer and more familiar than focusing on the ways in which he was available. Kim came to recognize more and more how she herself played an active in viewing the external world negatively and keeping herself in a depressed state. She realized that if she were not provocative and looked for positive things in the outside world, they would appear there much more often than she expected. In this way, she could become an agent of positive change.

Gradually, Kim became aware of how unstructured and vulnerable her current life situation was. She realized how she was hurting herself by her continuing alcohol and drug use, and by ignoring opportunities to return to school or work.

Regarding the developing therapeutic symbiosis, Seinfeld stated,

“Kim’s vulnerable self became more connected to the internal holding object (the therapist as supporter of independent functioning and provider of love) through the transference, and she experienced severe separation anxiety. She faced the fact that her life was a mess and that she felt like a vulnerable child. She began to believe that I really was going to help her, that our relationship could affect the direction of the rest of her life.”

Seinfeld continued to explain that, at the same time as these positive feelings emerged, Kim feared that letting Seinfeld get too close to her would allow him to overpower and dominate her sense of self. She still feared trusting another person closely due to all the rejection from her past. So, she had to be very careful and gradual in the way she came to trust Seinfeld, lest he turn “bad”. Occasionally, she had dreams in which the “good” Seinfeld would turn into a psychotic madman like her father.

Gradually, Kim let herself get more and more attached to Seinfeld, and as this happened she began to feel self-empathy for the first time in her life. She remembered the alone, fearful child she had been and wanted to help herself.

Strengthening the Therapeutic Symbiosis

Kim bought a pet parrot that she would care for at home. She imagined herself as a good parent nurturing a good child most of the time. When the bird became difficult and squawky, she would briefly view herself as the bad mother and the bird as bad child. As her relationship with Seinfeld improved, she came to nurture her pet more and more and to be bothered less and less by its noisiness. As a projective container, it reinforced her positive internal self-and-object images via the fantasies of love she projected into it, supported by her relationship to Seinfeld.

Over the next year, Seinfeld described Kim’s progress as follows,

“As Kim became less depressed and angry , her vulnerability and strivings for autonomy emerged. Having decided that she must do something to change her life, she managed to earn a high school diploma. She then pursued college courses and part-time work… She brought to me her ambitions and interests for mirroring admiration. Her ambitions, which were originally grandiose, gradually became realistic. She informed her drug-addicted boyfriend that he had to stop using cocaine if he wanted to continue to see her. She saw him less as a rejecting object and more as a person with problems that interefered with his capacity for intimac. His family eventually arranged to have him go for detoxification. Kim remained in contact with him but also started to see other men.”

Seinfeld then described how Kim gradually focused more and more on her own goals and independence, and became less dependent and close to Seinfeld as she had been at the height of the therapeutic symbiotic phase. Thus she transferred into a more “resolution of symbiosis”-like phase, as described in Article #10.

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Comments on Seinfeld’s Case of Kim

In this case study, one can see how in the early phases of treatment, Kim was at first oblivious to Seinfeld as a potential helper, due to the extreme neglect and abuse she experienced as a child which left her with a structural deficit of positive internal self and object images. She literally could not recognize help and love when she saw them.

As she gradually became aware of Seinfeld as a potentially helpful therapist, her fear that he might reject her like her parents had done, as well as her general unfamiliarity with and distrust of genuinely kind people, caused her to distance herself from him as a potential good object. It required painstaking work to become aware of how she herself continually viewed others (and later Seinfeld) as “all-bad” while rejecting the good aspects of the outside world in order to overcome this phase.

Eventually, the therapeutic symbiosis took over, and Kim was able to trust Seinfeld and take in his love and support. At this point, she was no longer “borderline”, and began to feel well and stable much of the time. She resumed school and work, developed new positive relationships with other men, and gained a healthy capacity to view people like her mother and abusive boyfriend as troubled people rather than persecutory rejectors.

In reading this article, I learned how important it is to identify the subtle ways in which we distort others into “all-bad” and “all-good”, when we are borderline. We can apply these case examples our own lives, since we all distort external reality to a greater or lesser degree. Since they are often based unrealistic projections from past negative relationships, learning to “distrust” or question our initial negative perceptions can be a positive, corrective process. It allows us to realize how the world outside is much more positive than it sometimes appears when we are viewing things through the lenses of “bad objects.”

Seinfeld As An Author

Seinfeld is one of those authors I read about a certain topic and say, “Wow, this guy is brilliant! That really is how things are!” I remember being struck right away by his penetrating descriptions of borderline problems and what was necessary to transform them. The reader is again recommended to his book, “The Bad Object”, which is available used on Amazon. Its case studies of successfully treated borderlines are some of the best of any book I’ve read, especially the cases of “Kim” described here, along with similar-length successful cases of “Justine”, “Diane”, “William”, and “Peggy.”

To understand Seinfeld’s concepts, it may again be useful for the reader who is unfamiliar with the psychodynamic explanation of BPD to skim through the following articles:

Seinfeld adapted an object relations theory of trauma, building on theories developed by Ronald Fairbairn working with abused children in the early 20th century. Seinfeld understood how parental neglect and abuse became internalized by the (future borderline) child, and then was constantly replayed in their adult life, causing the borderline symptoms. He adapted the four phases that Harold Searles pioneered with schizophrenic patients, and modified them for use with less-disturbed borderlines. These phases – Out-of-Contact, Ambivalent Symbiosis, Therapeutic Symbiosis, and Individuation – involved “reparenting” the borderline individual so that they learned to love themselves and eventually became able to love other people.

It’s hard to summarize everything else from Seinfeld’s book on how to treat Borderline Personality Disorder (The Bad Object). So, as with the post on Gerald Adler, I will focus on a few key points.

#1: The Concepts of Structural Deficit and Bad-Object Conflict

One of Seinfeld’s foundations for understanding BPD was seeing a borderline individual as having both “a structural deficit of positive self-and-object images” and “bad object conflict.”

What the structural deficit means is that, compared to a healthier or “normal” individual, a borderline has not taken in sufficient positive experiences with the outside world to feel secure psychologically. This results in an inner emptiness or psychic void that makes it harder for the borderline to take in new positive experiences in the present, since they have trouble recognizing them as positive. This is the same concept as Adler’s notion of introjective insufficiency:

In healthier people, who have had much nurturing, love and security in childhood, the high number of past positive memories serve as “receptors” that help them recognize, seek out, and take in new positive experiences. By contrast, the borderline-to-be child usually receives very poor responses to their need for nurturance. Instead of internalizing a sense of love, security, and blessing, the future borderline child is left with an emptiness or longing for love which then becomes repressed. That is the structural deficit as described by Seinfeld and Adler – the quantitative insufficiency of internal positive memories based on a lack of past external positive experiences.

It is the structural deficit that results in the borderline’s being relatively unreceptive to new positive experience. For the adult borderline, positive experience – for example, being offered friendship, acceptance, and interest by other people – will seem unfamiliar, strange, alien, and even threatening when they are encountered. This is why, early on in the therapeutic process, Seinfeld found that severely borderline patients often didn’t know how to relate to him in a positive way. Rather, they experienced him in his helping role as, “an alien creature from another psychic planet.”

#2: Bad Object Conflict

As for “bad object conflict”, Seinfeld understood this to mean that not only is there a lack of positive memories, but there is a predominance of powerful negative memories (or images of oneself and other people) in the borderline’s mind. These scary, traumatic negative memories don’t just sit there – they act to reject the internalization of new positive memories. They are like metaphorical demons or monsters that scare the patient away from trusting others.

The child who becomes borderline internalizes many memories of being unloved, rejected, and even hated by inadequate parents. These memories collectively form the unconscious “internal bad object” or “rejecting object.” Despite its painful nature, relating to a rejecting other as an adult often feels safer and more familiar than trusting someone new who might prove disappointing. Also, the borderline tends to feel a perverse loyalty toward the people who abused him in the past, and to feel he is “bad” and therefore unworthy of help from good people.

For both these reasons – fear of being vulnerable toward good people, and loyalty toward the bad people from the past – the borderline individual tends to reject potential help and remains attached to the image of themselves as a worthless, undeserving, bad person. This can be acted out in many ways – via remaining alone and isolated, via abusive or neglectful relationships with present-day partners, via staying attached to the original abusive parents in the present day, via self-injurious acting-out behaviors, and so on.

Therefore, Seinfeld described how the borderline acts in subtle and overt ways to actively maintain an internal negative view of themselves and others. I would call this, “Perpetuating the past in the present.” The bad-object conflict thereby works in a vicious cycle to maintain the “structural deficit” because as long as the activities focused around bad perceptions of oneself and others predominate, quantitatively speaking, then new positive experiences are not being taken in in sufficient amounts to “tip the balance” and effect lasting psychic change.

Seinfeld likened the negative and positive relationships of a borderline patient (as long as they remain borderline) to a mathematical equation. In his formula, negative relationships to external others are activated more frequently than positive relationships, maintaining the attachment to the internal bad object and preventing the internalization of a good set of self-and-object images strong enough to displace the bad object.

According to Seinfeld, unawareness of the good object (“object” meaning person or people) tends to occur more in the out-of-contact phase, and active rejection tends to occur more in the ambivalently symbiotic phase, as described in post #10 on the Four Phases. Active rejection is necessary in the ambivalent symbiotic phase, because the good-object images are strong enough in that phase to pose a threat to the internalized bad object, which the patient unconsciously fears losing (since it is what he is familiar with).

#3: The Exciting Object

Another key concept from Seinfeld’s writing is the nonhuman exciting object. The exciting object is any addictive, stimulating, non-human object that serves to fill the void created by the lack of the good object. Food, drugs, sex, alcohol, medications, excessive use of TV or internet, and other nonhuman “things” can provide an addictive fix to compensate for the lack of love that a borderline feels.

The exciting object is part of Seinfeld’s mathematical equation of how BPD works. Because of the structural deficit and the bad object conflict, the all-negative split self and object units are mostly dominant in the borderline’s mind. These all-negative images reject the taking in of new positive experience which could be soothing, and therefore the borderline feels mostly empty, unhappy, and unstable emotionally.

To try to assuage these bad feelings, the borderline turns to nonhuman exciting objects as described above. These exciting objects plug the “hole” or emptiness created by the lack of truly satisfying positive relationships to good people in the outside world. However, exciting objects can only do so temporarily, since they are not truly satisfying long-term. Once their effect wears off, frustration will set in, and the borderline will usually return to involvement with the bad self and object images. This will then lead to more psychic pain around bad objects, resulting in the need for more exciting objects to assuage it, and so on.

The main focus of Seinfeld’s book was not on the negative aspects of how a borderline functions, but on how to heal them. Seinfeld believed this could be done by interrupting the constant oscillation between rejecting and exciting objects via the internalization of a new good object relationship.

In normal language, the borderline needs to overcome their fear of trust and dependence, allowing themselves to develop a satisfying, loving relationship with the therapist. Seinfeld emphasized that successful therapy must move beyond a detached, professional relationship, and should explicitly involve love and closeness between patient and therapist. This does not mean that the pair are friends outside the sessions; rather, it means that a parental-like relationship of vulnerability, tenderness, and support is nurtured within the frame of the sessions.

This is the phase of therapeutic symbiosis. Seinfeld described how, “In this phase, there is a full reemergence of the vulnerable, regressive true self, in the care and protection of the idealized holding-therapist… At first, the patient’s vulnerable self is increasingly related to the therapist as holding object. The Internal positive self and object representation unit is increasingly dominant over the negative self and object representation unit, as long as the external therapist is highly available to reinforce the strengthening of the positive unit… As one patient said, “So long as everything is all right between you and me, I feel that all is well with the world. The good internal object serves to neutralize the bad, persecutory, rejecting object….

“In the later part of therapeutic symbiosis, the patient internalizes and identifies with the therapist to the point at which he is no longer so dependent upon the external therapist… The patient can now increasingly comfort, soothe, and mirror himself, regulating his own affect, mood, and self-esteem. In unconscious fantasy, he is now the comforter, sympathizer, and holder, as well as the comforted, empathized with, and held… All goodness is taken into the self; all badness is projected into the external object world…. In this way, the patient can establish a psychic foundation (of primarily positive self and object images) to eventually integrate the good and bad self and object units into whole, or ambivalently experienced, self and object images.” (pages 73-74)

Seinfeld’s Model of BPD – The Inversion of the Normative Developmental Psychic Process

Seinfeld continues, “The healthy child tries to take in or internalize the good object and reject or externalize the bad object. In the model I’m developing, the borderline patient manifests an inversion of the normative developmental process. Instead of taking in the positive object relations unit and rejecting the negative object relations unit, he takes in the negative object relations unit and rejects the positive object relations unit. In Fairbairn’s terms, he is attached to the internal bad object. The out-of-contact phase and ambivalent symbiosis are manifestations of the pathological inverted symbiosis in terms of the attachment to the bad object and rejection of the good object. Symbiosis becomes therapeutic when the patient adopts the normative but primitive developmental position of taking in all that is good and rejecting all that is bad. In this way, the patient can establish a psychic foundation to eventually integrate the good and bad object relations unit.” (page 75)

To me, this is a beautifully clear model of what causes BPD – bad relationships are taken in during development and reenacted continuously during adulthood, whereas good relationships are not taken in and are rejected later on. Successful recovery from BPD involves an reversal of this process.

Through the phase of therapeutic symbiosis, the patient can gradually gain confidence and make progress in three main areas in their outside life: 1) Leaving behind negative relationships (for example, to abusive partners, friends, or parents), 2) Developing new positive friendships and relationships to replace the bad ones, and 3) Developing enhanced autonomous functioning, work and interests.

In this way, the formerly borderline patient reverses the mathematical equation that had predominated when they were “borderline.” Instead of remaining attached to the all-negative images of themselves and others, the patient engages in new relationships and activities that are good, encouraging and self-supporting. In this way they take in a quantitative predominance of positive self-and-object images, and “spit out” the bad self and object images.

How To Interrupt the Rejecting-Exciting Object Cycle – Insight

The reader is probably interested as to how a borderline may start to break out of the negative-exciting object attachments. What Seinfeld worked on in therapy (and what one can work on with oneself) is developing the insight into how one sabotages oneself, which allows one to start making more constructive and adaptive choices instead.

Attachments to bad objects from the past are like schemas or relationship-templates that one replays over and over in the present “perpetuating the past in the present”), even though one doesn’t have to keep doing so. A person needs to identify how they are replaying bad relationships in the present, and treating themselves in the way that their parents did, to begin realizing how their behavior could change. As they become aware of the structural deficit (of positive self and other representations, resulting in unreceptivity toward good experience), and of the bad object conflict (which actively rejects and causes a person to fear good relationships), the borderline can start to actively seek out better experiences.

A great way to illustrate how this process works is via a case example. Hopefully, in the case of Kim above, the reader should be able to identify the structural deficit, bad object-conflict, use of exciting objects, and the ways in which Seinfeld interrupted these activities and nurtured insight in the patient, to encourage internalization of the therapist as a good object.

Recovery as a Mythic Journey

Lastly, I loved Seinfeld’s view of the therapy process as a mythic or epic journey. Seinfeld states (page ix), “This volume shows how to help the patient overcome what has been decribed as the most serious obstacle to psychotherapy: the negative therapeutic reaction. It is the bad object that is predominantly responsible for this reaction. The patient and therapist enduring the travails of the therapeutic journey often resemble Odysseus and his crew forced to outwit the demons, sirens, witches, and Cyclops threatening to thwart the long voyage. In fact, those mythological demons personify the manifold masks of the bad object often described as exciting (but not satisfying), enticing, bewitching, addicting, engulfing, rejecting , punishing, and persecuting…

“The bad object is comprised of the actual negative attributes of the parental figures – often a composite of both mother and father along with later figures resembling them – and the child’s fantasies and distortions about these figures. In this regard, the unsatisfactory experiences with the parental figures give rise to frustration and anger, which color the child’s perception of the object… The designation “bad” regarding the other person does not refer to a moral valuation but rather to the child’s subjective unsatisfactory experience with it… Therapeutic progress threatens the patient and therapist with the terrible wrath of the bad object. The patient is conflicted between his loyalty and fear of the bad object and the longing to enter into a good object relationship that will promote separation from the bad object… Fairbairn believed that the term “salvation” was a more apt designation than that of “cure” for the patient’s subjective experience of his need to be rescued from the bad object.” (preface page x)

This article is getting long enough already! I hope the reader, whether having borderline traits themselves, or wanting to help or understand someone with BPD, has found some interesting insights in Seinfeld’s approach to treating Borderline Personality Disorder.

Lastly, here is an interview and memoriam for Jeffrey Seinfeld, who sadly passed away a few years ago.

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or are trying to help a borderline individual, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment.

Spending the last two weeks visiting my extended family in England provided a great opportunity to reflect on my journey over the past few years.

I had not returned from America to my homeland for six years. In 2007, the symptoms of BPD had a powerful hold over me. Extended travel away from home was so stressful that I could barely appreciate the positive aspects of a holiday trip to visit loved ones.

In the past, overwhelming feelings of being alone, abandoned, and afraid would prevent me from relating meaningfully to my extended family. Being healthier emotionally than my own parents, my uncles, aunts, and cousins would make genuine efforts to reach me and make me feel accepted.

However, these efforts barely reached me, because my emotional suffering canceled out everything else, and because I had no idea how to love or be loved by others. In fact, I experienced my relatives’ efforts to show me love as a threat. Emotional closeness had barely existed in my immediate family, and so its sudden appearance in them seemed alien, strange, and frightening.

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies, there is a scene where King Theoden of Rohan is possessed by the evil spirit, Lord Sauron. Theoden looks aged beyond his years, and is unnaturally cold, with his coat and beard covered in ice. He barely recognizes his loving daughter and son. When the heroes of the story visit him, he unfeelingly asks why he should welcome them.

As those who have seen the movie may remember, Theoden is freed after the wizard Gandalf exorcises Sauron’s spirit from him. With the curse lifted, Theoden appears immediately younger, warmer, and is shocked at how coldly he acted previously. He returns to life and becomes able to love his family again.

When I saw this scene, I immediately associated it metaphorically with the way in which traumatic, neglectful experiences “possesses” people who are later said to have Borderline Personality Disorder. Abuse and neglect can warp people’s personalities and transform them into shadows of who they otherwise would have been. In technical terms, they are possessed by “bad objects”, or negative experience from the past, which prevents them from becoming the loving person they could be in the present.

Back to my trip to visit extended family – I had a fantastic experience! For the first time, I could deeply feel the love they had for me. I was nervous about how my family might react, since I had not visited for many years. However, they went out of their way to make me feel welcome. They provided a warm place to stay, included me in family meals, helped me get around London, and showed real interest in how my life in America was going.

When I was swamped with borderline symptoms, it had never dawned on me that these people had their own work, relationships, and interests. But now, I could perceive my relatives as separate, distinct people and really come to know them in the meaningful sense of that word. Previously, I would use them, but have no interest in them beyond their ability to satisfy my immediate needs. This year, I discovered my uncles, aunt, and cousins as real people for the first time.

While exploring London, I was fascinated to discover how people in London, UK live so differently than in my American suburb – for example, they use public transport all the time, walk great distances, have few big cars, shop at tiny grocery stores, etc. Christmastime was fantastic – there were crafts markets full of international artisans, outdoor ice skating rinks everywhere, magicians and acrobats peforming in public parks.

These varied sights were meaningful in that when I was severely borderline, I would not have noticed them, or at least would not have delighted in them. I would have been like King Theoden, “possessed” by my negative emotions and prevented from taking in good things from the outside world. However, in 2013, a childlike sense of wonder and discovery dawned on me.

In his great writing on borderline conditions, the psychoanalyst Harold Searles described how the successfully treated borderline patient would eventually experience a psychic “rebirth”. The person would belatedly experience a sense of wonder and discovery, of being the child that joyfully explores the world for the first time.

It is important that such a regression not go on too long, because it is also critical to mourn the real losses in a childhood marked by severe abuse, and to develop mature adult emotional capacities in general.

However, every borderline deserves to one day feel this childlike joy – the delight of knowing that you are better, that you are alive, and that the world is there for you to discover.

Another primary emotion in me right now is vindication. This recent vacation is yet another, among hundreds of positive experiences in the last few years, by which I have disproven those who say that BPD is incurable and hopeless. I know that one can recover fully from Borderline Personality Disorder – and not even have the disorder at all anymore – because I am living that recovery.

If I’m to become more fully mature, I’ll need to fully relinquish the desire to get back at those who kept me down in the past. However, proving people wrong remains one of my favorite things, and so it won’t be too damaging to delight a little bit in my ongoing victory over the “false prophets of Borderline Personality Disorder.”

Among the “false prophets of BPD”, I include:

– Those therapists and laypeople who say that Borderline Personality Disorder is life-long, i.e. that once you have BPD it cannot ever fully go away, the implication being that it can only be managed while living a life periodically afflicted by its symptoms.
– Psychiatrists who believe BPD is biologically- or genetically-caused and needs to be treated primarily with medication.
– Anyone who says that borderlines are bad or evil, that they are not motivated to get better, and that they have a bad prognosis or are hopeless.

To all such pessimists, I am delighted to prove you wrong on a daily basis. There is a reason this post is titled, “Life After Borderline Personality Disorder.” Whether or not you believe what I write doesn’t matter one iota, because my feelings and experiences are 100% real to me. I am your reckoning.

I only hope that other borderlines will take heart from people like me who have recovered. Borderlines have enough challenges with which to deal on the road to recovery, without being burdened by the discouraging opinions of those who stigmatize them.

My message to borderlines reading this is – Don’t pay one bit of attention to the pessimists and liars that say you can’t get better. Borderline Personality Disorder can be fully recovered from, and life can be far better than you imagined. Let yourself dream of a better tomorrow for yourself and those you love.

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I welcome any correspondance at bpdtransformation@gmail.com

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or are trying to help a borderline individual, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment.

If you have recently been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, you are probably wondering what to do to start getting better. Or perhaps you’re wondering if it’s possible to recover at all.

Deep, lasting recovery from BPD takes a significant amount of time – in my opinion, at least 3-5 years to move far along the road to being emotionally well. However, it is possible to begin going in the right direction immediately. The early years of recovery for a borderline individual, while sometimes very challenging, can be rewarding and meaningful in the long run.

Step 1 – Educate Yourself about BPD

One of the most important things for someone diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder to do is to become informed about the disorder. In my opinion, three interrelated areas are useful to learn about:

1) What BPD is and how it “works” from different viewpoints.
2) Different treatment options.
3) Case studies of former borderlines who have now recovered.

For step one, the most basic, but limited way of understanding BPD is reading its definition in the DSM. After that, basic books like The Borderline Personality Disorder Survival Guide (Chapman), Stop Walking on Eggshells (Mason), and I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me (Kreisman) can give a basic overview of BPD’s characteristics.

While they can be useful initially, I no longer give much credence to these books, since they are superficial and give little guidance about how to recover. They tend to cater to friends and family, rather than to the individual diagnosed with BPD. Also, some of them hold the viewpoint that BPD is a disease to be struggled with for life, rather than a condition that can be fully recovered from. That is something that my experience has disproven.

Books that Helped Me Understand BPD And Have Optimism About It

To address steps one and three – how BPD works, and stories of people who recovered – I learned the most from two sources. First, from reading therapists’ case studies of borderlines who they successfully treated. These case studies usually illustrate important facets of the disorder, including its developmental genesis, the use of splitting and projective identification, typical phases of treatment, how the attachment to bad relationships works, the fear of trust and dependence, and so on. Second, I learned from reading material on the internet and in print by borderlines in recovery. These first-hand accounts of recovery written by former borderlines can be more powerful and direct than second-hand accounts of recovery seen through the eyes of a therapist. All of these books provide hope that lasting recovery from BPD is real and possible.

Realistic hope for BPD recovery is critical – hope that committed, hard work over a lengthy period will lead to a better life free from borderline symptoms. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that how one thinks and fantasizes about oneself in relation to Borderline Personality Disorder makes a big difference. At first, via my research and through therapy I worked on convincing myself that BPD could be deeply recovered from. Replacing my former pessimism and fear about BPD being a hopeless, life-long disorder with optimism about recovery helped me immeasurably. Later on, I came to question whether BPD was a valid diagnosis at all, which I no longer believe it is. But that is not so important initially as nurturing the simple belief that no matter what one’s problems are, they can get better.

At the bottom of this article, you can find listings of books by therapists about their successful treatment of BPD patients. They are mostly psychodynamic or psychoanalytic, since that is the viewpoint that was most useful in my own journey. I bought all these books used for low prices off Amazon. Also, some good online and print sources written by recovered borderlines are described.

Treatment Options – Psychotherapy

If one is diagnosed with BPD and can afford it, therapy can be one of the most important drivers of recovery. As a teenager, I was fortunate to have my therapy funded by my parents. Later on, I lived frugally while paying for treatment myself. Therapy can be expensive, but many therapists use a sliding scale of reduced fees correlating to ability to pay. If you want therapy but feel you cannot afford it, do not give up. Make sure you search around your area for different reduced rate or pro bono options. In large cities, there are hospital-based nonprofit clinics which offer low-rate or even free group and individual therapy.

What type of therapy is the best? Obviously, that is a question that cannot be answered objectively. In my view, the more important factors are the motivation of the person suffering with BPD, and the personal qualities of the therapist regardless of their orientation. However, with that caveat I believe that that the two best kinds of therapy for BPD are psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). I am biased toward psychoanalytic treatment for BPD because it worked for me. I have no direct experience of DBT. However, it has worked for many others suffering from borderline symptoms, so I recommend it also.

Many uninformed therapists are pessimistic about BPD or do not know how to treat it. However, there are also many therapists out there who are skilled at treating BPD. They know from experience that lasting recovery from BPD is possible. If you seek treatment, it is obviously important to find the latter kind of provider.

This site has the largest and most up-to-date listing of therapists currently available in the United States and Canada. Once you click on a region, you can search for therapist by orientation (psychodynamic, dialectical, etc.), by specialty (borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, anxiety, etc.), and so on. For example, I just searched in the large American city nearest me, and found over 70 therapists who specialize in treating Borderline Personality Disorder. You can also find therapists that are covered by different insurance providers, which is important because insurance can often cover a significant part of the cost of therapy. And you can directly email or call the therapists directly from the site.

My Therapist Interview Process

I used Psychology Today’s site to find a good therapist several years ago. What I did was to email and call all the therapists I was interested in, asking them a few brief questions. I introduced myself in a friendly way and asked them some version of the following:

– Do you have a lot of experience treating personality disorders, in particular Borderline Personality Disorder?
– Do you believe that individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder can be successfully treated? In particular, do you believe that a sufferer of BPD can become free of the disorder over the long term, i.e. come to live a healthy life free largely free of borderline symptoms?
– Are you willing to meet with me for a 15 minute free in-person consultation to see if we might be a good fit?

If the therapist answered no to any of these questions, I rejected them. For me, a therapist who won’t volunteer 15 minute of their time for a brief consultation is not worth your time. If the therapist had little past experience treating personality disorders, I discounted them. That might be arbitrary, but it made sense to me that I wanted someone with a lot of experience treating a difficult condition. And most important, if they were at all pessimistic or doubtful about recovery from BPD being possible, I moved on. I met two therapists in person who thought that BPD was a lifelong “disorder”, the symptoms of which could be managed but would always remain with the sufferer. These “therapists” were poorly educated charlatans who shouldn’t be given the time of day. I was happy to walk out of their offices and go on to find someone much better.

Alongside these kinds of questions, one might also ask if the therapist offers a sliding scale of fees based on income. Good therapists often do this, but they will not always advertise it up front, since of course they have to treat many patients at full price to make a good living.

For me, finding a good therapist for BPD was like shopping for a car or a house. It’s a big decision that requires careful consideration and research. In some cases, the buyer should beware.

Much more could be written about different types of therapy. Those will not be explored here, mainly because I am not an authority on different types of therapy for BPD (I only know a significant amount about psychodynamic-psychoanalytic approaches). However, I encourage you, if you are diagnosed with BPD, to research other types of therapy and come to the best understanding possible of your options.

Medication

I hesitate to include this part, because it is controversial. However, it is best to be honest about one’s views. For most people, I do not believe that psychiatric medication is a major long-term contributor to recovery from BPD.

Medication can play a role in the early phases of treatment. It can be useful because it controls symptoms in the short term, usually for a period of months. If a borderline individual is struggling with overwhelming suicidal impulses, or with terrible, unamanageable anxiety, medication can be useful to stabilize them. It can bring down the temperature and stop a person from “overheating” emotionally. I was prescribed anti-depressant medication for this reason myself in my late teens and early 20s. However, I then decided to taper off of it, and I have not used medication at all for the last six years.

However, beyond stabilizing short-term symptoms, I believe that medication is a waste of money and potentially dangerous. I recently read the books Anatomy of an Epidemic, by Robert Whitaker, and The Myth of the Chemical Cure, by Johanna Moncrief. These and many other books on the subject make clear that psychiatric medication carries with it the risk of severe long-term side effects that are currently poorly understood. In particular, there is the scary and very real possibility of tardive dyskinesia (uncontrollable, often irreversible movements of the mouth and other body parts) in those who take psychiatric medication long term.

For me, there are several problematic emotional aspects to using medication long-term in the treatment of BPD. Using medication long-term promotes the myth that taking a pill can magically solve one’s emotional problems. It implies that one does not have the ability to deal with long-standing issues interpersonally. And it suggests that the primary source of one’s problems is biochemical or genetic, which for me is pessimistic and false. As referenced in Whitaker’s book, disturbing long-term studies are now showing that if they take medication long term, patients with several types of psychiatric disorders do worse on most measures of recovery than those who never take them. Big Pharma companies are denying these results. But of course, they have billions of reasons to do so.

I recommend that people do their own research and come to their own conclusions about medication. My position is that therapy, self-help, and support from family and friends are the main drivers of recovery. If I were to start over with recovery, I would remain open to taking medication in the short term to provide relief from overwhelming symptoms. However, I am so glad to be off medication for the past six years. It gives me the empowering feeling that my own actions are responsible for my recovery, that I am a free agent.

Other Sources of Support Early In Recovery – Family and Friends

On my recovery journey, learning about how the borderline disorder works, reading stories about how former borderlines recovered, and finding an effective therapist were key early steps.

Support from family and friends is also very important. If one’s family can come to understand BPD in a compassionate way and be supportive of one’s recovery, that can obviously be tremendously helpful. My mother never actually knew that I had BPD, but she nevertheless supported me to go to therapy, gave me a place to live, and was available to talk for several years after I graduated from college. Without her financial and emotional support, I would not be where I am today.

Opening up to friends about BPD can also be valuable, although it can feel risky. Over the course of five years (between ages 17-22), I told four people I met about my history of physical abuse and the problems between my parents, who divorced when I was 18. Although they never knew that I had BPD, Gareth, Julian, Andrew and Helena did discover that I was severely depressed, occasionally sometimes suicidal, and that I had great difficulty trusting and opening up to other people. They became invaluable sources of support and helped me to feel less alone during the early period of my recovery.

I was very hesitant initially to confide in these people, since I had no real friends at the time and feared that they would reject me. The antidependent side of me did not want to risk asking anyone else for help. However, the healthier, dependent part of me correctly sensed that they were kind, mature people, and it eventually won out. Gareth was an older family man in his 40s that I met through tennis, Julian was a fellow high school student in the class above me, and Andrew and Helena were young people in their mid 20s who worked at a spiritual retreat center that my family went to every summer.

Where to Find Friends Who Support Your Recovery

If you don’t have friends like this yet, there are many people out there willing to help. Online web boards and forums can be useful places to find support, but nothing replaces meeting people in real life and talking face-to-face. For that reason, I believe that group therapy and 12-step groups are extremely valuable. I attended both in my late teens and in my 20s.

Many therapists listed on the Psychology Today site above run or make referrals to group therapy. To find such groups it is usually necessary to get referrals from therapists or local hospitals and social work clinics. I went to a group for emotionally troubled young people at the state college that I attended. The university hospital ran this group, and it was free.

Regarding 12-step groups, I met several great people at these meetings that became friends whom I could call or meet in person during difficult periods. Twelve-step groups exist for almost every possible emotional problem, including eating disorders, sex addiction, drug and alcohol addiction, gambling, self-harm, and many more. Here is a list of 30 different 12-step groups, along with their websites:http://www.12step.org/12-Step-Groups/

Also, Meetup (www.meetup.com) is a great way to make new friends in your local community. This worldwide online platform creates groups for specific interests that meet in real life. I met several of my current friends through Meetup groups in my area. This might not be the very first step to take in BPD recovery, but once the borderline individual is more confident and ready to leave behind past abusive relationships, Meetup provides access to a whole new world of people.

I hope this article has provided some useful ideas for those wondering where to start looking for help with BPD recovery (and please also see the books below). The central, overriding goal throughout my recovery from BPD was to learn to trust and develop satisfying relationships with other people. Good long-term psychotherapy can help a borderline individual come to trust and truly depend on another person for the first time. Therapy groups, 12 step programs, friends, and family can be invaluable sources of support, with or without individual therapy. Lastly, the individual’s own self-advocacy and motivation to get better are perhaps the most critical drivers of their recovery.

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Therapists’ Books About Borderlines Who Recovered

The Bad Object – By Jeffrey Seinfeld. Seinfeld’s successful cases of Kim, William, Justine, Diane, and Peggy are detailed 20-30 page “stories” of these borderline patients’ lives. Seinfeld tells how they went from severely borderline to learning to trust him and becoming increasingly functional and independent. Seinfeld, a New York-based social worker who recently passed away, is one of my heroes for how optimistically he writes about BPD.

Six Steps in the Treatment of Borderline Personality Organization – by Vamik Volkan. This internationally renowned psychoanalyst was a master at conceptualizing and treating BPD. In this book he illustrates his conceptual understanding of BPD, and outlines six phases of successful treatment that he used. His account of his treatment of Patti, the borderline patient whose history fills half this book, is a touching and ultimately triumphant story of how Patti became a mature adult over a period of several years.

Borderline Psychopathology and its Treatment – by Gerald Adler. In this book, Adler defined specific phases in the successful treatment of BPD and reviews the treatment course for several borderlines with whom he worked. Adler, a Boston-based psychiatrist, uses a deficit model of BPD which is different from some other psychodynamic writers. He focuses on the relative absence of positive introjections and the inability to regulate emotions, rather than on the attachment to bad objects. I met Adler in Boston in 2008 to discuss BPD, and he is still very optimistic about treating the disorder, while not being unrealistic about the major challenges involved. Adler is such a kind man, and he is another one of my “idols of BPD” 🙂

Psychotherapy of the Borderline Adult – by James Masterson. Masterson describes his theory of BPD treatment, which is focused on working through negative feelings and encouraging independence in the patient. He tells the stories of several young and middle-age adult patients who had strong outcomes, becoming able to love and work. I’m not a big fan of Masterson’s theories, since for me they overemphasize autonomy at the expense of dependence and closeness, but I respect his success in treating BPD. Until he recently passed away, Masterson practiced therapy in New York where he developed an institute which trained other therapists in how to treat personality disorders including BPD.

The Difficult Borderline Patient, Not So Difficult to Treat – by Helen Albanese. This book has a strange title, but it’s a great book! It was written in 2012, by a Texas-based university therapist who has worked with borderlines for decades and is very optimistic about BPD. In this short volume, she describes her understanding of how borderlines repeat and cling to past traumatic experience. She describes how therapists can help separate the borderline from bad external relationships and promote the development of an authentic self.

The Angry Heart: Overcoming Borderline and Addictive Disorders – by Santoro and Cohen. This was one of my first introductions to BPD. It is a very empathic and informed view of BPD and how to recover from it, from a mainly cognitive-behavioral viewpoint. However, it does not have the lengthy case studies of some of the other titles above.

Listening Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Interpreting the Countertransference – Lawrence Hedges. I hesitate to recommend these books because they is quite technical. However, they moved me toward my current viewpoint about BPD being more useful as a metaphorical term than as a mental health diagnosis. In this work, California psychoanalyst Hedges explicates his theories about Borderline Personality Disorder, as well as about psychosis, narcissism, and neurotic conditions. He explains how these conditions are formed in past childhood trauma and perpetuated by adult relational patterns and defenses. However, Hedges also believes that these disorders do not exist as distinct medical entities, and he explains why. When I went to Los Angeles last year, I got a chance to meet Hedges in person. He is still very optimistic about borderline-spectrum conditions. He told me how he, his colleagues, and his supervisees had treated dozens of people with severe borderline conditions over the past several decades, often with significant success.

Online and Print Accounts of Recovery by Borderlines, in their own words

Borderline Personality From the Inside Out – by A.J. Mahari

You can find A.J.’s website at http://www.borderlinepersonality.ca
In my opinion, A.J.’s website is the best online source of information about BPD. A Canadian blogger who was diagnosed as borderline many years ago, A.J. writes with great wisdom and experience about every aspect of the borderline experience. By the mid 1990’s, A.J. had meaningfully recovered from BPD, and she has spent the last 15+ years encouraging others to do the same. She also offers “recovery coaching” services to current borderlines. If I had known about her 10 years ago, I would not have hesitated to get coaching from her (well, being honest about myself 10 years ago, I might have hesitated, but that’s another story! 🙂

Healing from BPD – by Debbie Corso.
Debbie’s website is – http://www.my-borderline-personality-disorder.com/Debbie is a young woman from California who tells the story of her journey to recover from Borderline Personality Disorder using DBT. Over the past few years, Debbie has progressed to the point where is no longer diagnosable with BPD, and she is a great example of how motivation and hard work can lead to successful recovery. I highly recommend her website and blog.

Get Me Out Of Here: My Recovery From Borderline Personality Disorder – By Rachel Reiland.

Rachel Reiland, a young mother and wife, suffered from severe BPD which manifested itself in symptoms including anorexia, promiscuity, and suicide attempts. In this book, she tells the story of how she faced these challenges using intensive psychotherapy and the support of her family and friends. By 2004, when she published this book, she had meaningfully recovered from BPD, and her recovery has been stable and lasting for the past 10 years. Today, Reiland does radio interviews, blog postings, and generally spreads the message that recovery from BPD is real and possible. More information about her can be found at http://www.getmeoutofherebook.com

This is another moving account of long-term recovery from BPD. Van Gelder honestly describes her traumatic family history and the resulting behaviors it led to including drug addiction, suicidal thinking, and severe mood swings. She courageously sought help via group therapy – the book contains interesting accounts of how DBT works in groups – and via the unconventional methods of Buddhist spirituality and online dating. These unusual things that helped Van Gelder are reminders that every recovery process is different, and that what works for some people may not work for others. I would not use online dating, but I’m glad it helped her!

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I welcome any correspondance at bpdtransformation@gmail.com

If you are struggling with BPD yourself or would like to more effectively help someone who is borderline, I would be happy to listen to your story and provide feedback if possible. Feel free to provide constructive criticism of this site also.

This article is the opinion of a non-professional layperson, and should not be taken as medical advice or as the view of a therapist who is professionally qualified to treat Borderline Personality Disorder or any other mental health condition. Readers should consult with a qualified mental health professional before undertaking any treatment.